A U.S.-drafted chapter on Internet use would require ISPs to police user-generated content, to cut off Internet access for copyright violators, and to remove content that is accused of copyright violation without any proof of actual violation. The chapter also completely prohibits DRM workarounds, even for archiving or retrieving one's own work. Read on for details and implications.

As with other sections of the treaty, portions of this element have been leaked online. As it stands, the leaks suggest Internet users around the world are headed for a new regime of IP enforcement - a culture of invasive searches, minimal privacy, guilt until innocence is proven and measures that would kill our normative behaviors of file-sharing, free software, media downloading, creative remixing and even certain civil liberties.

Allegedly modeled on sections of the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, the treaty would require ISPs to police user activity for possible copyright violation, and ISPs would be held responsible for any infringing content being uploaded or downloaded. This all spells a huge boon to the established entertainment industry and a huge burden for ISPs.

"In order for ISPs to qualify for a safe harbor," writes Michael Geist, who has published the substance of the leaked material, "they would be required establish policies to deter unauthorized storage and transmission of IP infringing content. Provisions... include policies to terminate subscribers in appropriate circumstances." That means a three-strikes rule would apply to anyone who was accused of violating copyright in any way; ISPs would be required to terminate the user's account after three complaints from the content owner. For something as culturally accepted as downloading music, a user's entire household could be cut off from the Internet and access to information, communication, personal account management, et cetera.

Geist continues, "Notice-and-takedown, which is not currently the law in Canada nor a requirement under WIPO, would also be an ACTA requirement." In other words, whether or not a piece of content or media violates copyright would be arbitrary; the content would be removed by the ISP as soon as a takedown notice was issued. The takedown would be enforced regardless of considerations such as fair use. This policy, which mirrors the DMCA, would be enforced for all nations participating in the treaty.

Finally, the treaty includes a ban on circumventing DRM and other copyright-protecting measures in hardware and software, as well as a ban on the manufacture, import and distribution of circumvention tools. Again, this ban is irrespective of circumstance or content ownership and is inflexible.

Our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, arbiters of freer use of copyrighted material, have this to say:

U.S. negotiators are seeking policies that will harm the U.S. technology industry and citizens across the globe. Three Strikes/ Graduated Response is the top priority of the entertainment industry... The ACTA text appears to leave the door open for major changes to the existing national Internet intermediary liability regimes that have been the global status quo since the mid 1990s, and which have underpinned both tremendous Internet innovation, and citizens' online freedom of expression and the rich world of user generated content that we take for granted today.

European citizens should also be concerned and indignant. As reported, the ACTA Internet provisions would also appear to be inconsistent with the EU eCommerce Directive and existing national law...

Are international treaties governing Internet content and intellectual property even necessary? Insofar as they fly in the face of normative cultural practices and contradict or tighten existing national laws, we find these suggested measures inflexible and unrealistic. But whether they become reality and shape the landscape of the Internet-to-come remains to be seen.

Traditionally the champions of Creative Commons and other, more open methods of IP protection and creative sharing of content online, EFF is now calling out a bevy of big-name media corporations to make examples of them for takedown abuse. According to the EFF blog, "Some of the web's most interesting content has been yanked from popular websites with bogus copyright claims or other spurious legal threats." Read on to see who made the list and why.

"But that hasn't stopped thin-skinned corporations and others from abusing the legal system to get these new works removed from the Internet. We wanted to document this censorship for all to see."

Some of the entities that have made EFF's roundup are as follows:

• NPR, for attempting to stifle a video criticizing same-sex marriage
• DeBeers, for its humorless response to an online parody
• NBC, for issuing a takedown for a satirical Obama video that went viral
• And a personal favorite, Ralph Lauren, who shot out a few takedowns after our good friends at Photoshop Disasters pointed out that, even in already thin models, a woman's head is not likely to be wider than her pelvis

Other honorees include Warner Music Group, CBS News, Universal Music Publishing Group, and the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association.

Is the EFF conducting a witchhunt here, dear readers? Are some of these copyright claims warranted? Or do you, in fact, have an egregious takedown of your own to report? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

While groups such as the National Writers Union oppose the settlement on the grounds that Google is violating author rights, and Yahoo and Microsoft oppose the settlement for fear of a price fixing cartel, the latest objection adds new perspective.

The argument reminded us of John Battelle's "database of intentions" - an aggregated list of personal search results, page visits and bookmarks. He explains that while the database of intention lives in a number of places, four major players including Google hold the bulk of this information. He wrote, "This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind - a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends."

While this may seem like a paranoia today, it wasn't long ago that rumors surfaced of US intelligence authorities monitoring net usage to gain electronic evidence against members of al-Queda. In response, Darwinder S. Sidhu's 2007 report outlines how the majority of polled Muslim-Americans believe that their Internet activities are being monitored.

The latest Google privacy objection argues that this fear of being tracked is enough reason for consumers to change their behavior. For the complete filing download the PDF

If you thought your casual reading might have a slim chance of being subpoenaed, would you change your reading habits? Let us know in the comments below.

This is an important subject for those companies looking to enter into the geo-locational space. Groups that encrypt their data are taking pains to reduce the threat of identity theft, illegal surveillance or for data to be subpoenaed by a court. These companies will be rewarded with customer loyalty when the unfortunate time comes for one or all three of the above scenarios.

Those critical of encryption might suggest that law-abiding citizens have nothing to hide, but that simply isn't true. What if you're in alcoholics anonymous? Or you've simply spent the night at a person's house? And honestly, do you really want your running club to see how often you eat at Arby's? Encryption allows us to ping our friends while maintaining an air of mystique, and at the end of the day, the companies that care about their customers, keep them.

Draper earned his "Captain Crunch" nickname after he realized that the toy whistles packaged in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal created the perfect 2600 Hz tone - the same tone used on telephones with single frequency controls. From here, Draper was able to create a "blue box" that mimicked the tones used by various phone companies and was able to take control of the international phone network to make free long-distance calls.

After reading an Esquire article about Draper in 1971, Wozniak admits he then went on to create his own devices to emit similar tones and even went so far as to make a prank call to the Pope. A number of articles including one quoting John Draper go on to suggest that Wozniak and Jobs sold blue boxes out of their dorm rooms for money.

So how on earth has Apple's playful hacker spirit manifested into such a culture of fear? While it's true that phone hacks can be well utilized by unsavory criminals, the vast majority of iPhone jail breakers simply want to utilize 3rd party applications that are not available in the App Store. ReadWriteWeb has already covered a number of reputable applications in this category including Spotify and Google Voice.

Says EFF spokesperson Fred von Lohmann," The culture of tinkering (or hacking, if you prefer) is an important part of our innovation economy. Many iPhone owners will be happy to choose solely from the applications that Apple is willing to approve...but if you want to pop the hood, the DMCA surely shouldn't stand in your way."

Photo credit for Steve Wozniak's Blue Box at the Computer History Museum: Wikipedia User RaD man

For example, former AT&T technician Mark Klein received an EFF Pioneer Award for blowing the whistle on the government's illegal phone wiretapping and surveillance program. Klein leaked news of AT&T employing splitters to send duplicates of fiber optic signals to a security-restricted company room controlled by the US National Security Agency at San Francisco's Folsom Street facilities. Klein's testimony is the proof that the phone company gave the US government access to private phone calls, emails and text messages. Despite the fact that those surveyed had never been connected to terrorist actions. The EFF continues to celebrate Klein's actions in it's work to end NSA domestic spy programs.

While the EFF has given its Pioneer Award to a number of CEOs and technologists, it's clear to see that Klein's testimony has had a major impact on the fate of the American people. If you'd like to nominate your own hero, check out the EFF's blog.

Meanwhile Facebook has been widely criticized after suing Power.com, a service that allows users to import Facebook friends and posts into other social networking services. Data portability proponents like the Electronic Frontiers Foundation argue that Facebook is making data migration an unnecessarily tedious process for its users. Perhaps a native Twitter app and this possible foray into external push features is exactly what the company needs to further expand on an experience that is too often knocked for being insular.

The populist legal organization made a post to its blog today arguing that copyright holders became overzealous with their use of YouTube's ContentID tool in January and flagged for deletion many videos that the EFF believes constitute Fair Use. The post puts out a call for people who've lost their content and want to take legal action.

Using YouTube's new automated copright detection technology, Warner Brothers detected last month that 15 year old Juliet Weybret had posted a video of herself playing the piano and singing the 1934 song Winter Wonderland. This unrepentant little criminal might have thought that such a widely covered tune had entered the public domain, 75 years after it was recorded, but Juliet was clearly unfamiliar with legislation like the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act, which extended copyright protection to 95 years or more after publication date.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is not happy with the situation. About YouTube's Copyright ID technology, the EFF wrote today:

These systems are still primitive and unable to distinguish a transformative remix from copyright infringement. So unless they leave lots of breathing room for remixed content, these filters end up sideswiping lots of fair uses. And that's exactly what has happened these past few weeks. And while today it's Warner Music, as more copyright owners start using the Content ID tool, it'll only get worse. Soon it may be off limits to remix anything with snippets of our shared mass media culture -- music, TV, movies, jingles, commercials. That would be a sad irony -- copyright being used to stifle an exciting new wellspring of creativity, rather than encourage it.

It's clear from the Warner Music experience that YouTube's Content ID tool fails to separate the infringements from the arguable fair uses. And while YouTube offers users the option to dispute a removal (if it's an automated Content ID removal) or send a formal DMCA counter-notice (if it's an official DMCA takedown), many YouTube users, lacking legal help, are afraid to wave a red flag in front of Warner Music's lawyers. That's a toxic combination for amateur video creators on YouTube.

What does the EFF intend to do about it? The organization has put out a call to people who have had videos taken off of YouTube at the behest of Warner and whose videos were both noncommercial and substantially original. The EFF says it will help serve a counter notice and offer legal protection to as many people as it can. "We can't promise to take every case," they say, "but neither will we stand by and watch semi-automated takedowns trample fair use."

Can the EFF change the game on YouTube? Given the organization's healthy list of previous legal victories, we think it will be a good fight at the very least.

In order to make an iPod work with an alternative software program - like gtkpod, Winamp, and Songbird, for example - developers need to understand a file called iTunesDB. To prevent people from writing to this file, Apple protects it with a checksum hash which has to be reverse-engineered. Usually that process only takes a couple of days.

With the latest iTunes update, Apple has once again changed the hash, meaning it needs to be reverse-engineered again. The developers doing so collaborate together and share their thoughts on iPodhash, an open-source project hosted on Bluwiki, a free web site that lets users create wiki pages.

Now Apple has asked for that site to come down, a request that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says is out of line. Earlier this month, a lawyer from Apple's legal firm O'Melveny & Myers sent out a takedown notice to the site stating the content was illegal under the terms of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). According to the cease-and-desist email, the site is "disseminating information designed to circumvent Apple's FairPlay digital rights management system." It continued, "FairPlay is considered anti-circumvention technology under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA explicitly prohibits the dissemination of information that can be used to circumvent such technology."

The EFF has jumped on this case, saying that Apple "doesn't have a DMCA leg to stand on." According to EFF senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann, this move is effectively bending the law in order to stifle free speech. "Apple is essentially saying here that people can't even talk about the mechanisms that Apple uses to lock in its music to the iTunes software," he said.

The EFF web site goes into more details as to why the EFF believes Apple to be in the wrong, listing the numerous reasons why there's no DMCA violation on the site.

Where Does This Leave The Linux Community?

Since the Bluwiki site has complied with the takedown notice, the question is where does this leave the Linux community now? The main reason for the iPodhash project's existence is due to the fact that Apple does not provide a version of iTunes that runs on Linux. The project is an important community effort that helps Linux users create software programs that work with their iPods and iPhones.

Bluwiki's founder, Sam Odio, had said he was unsure if putting the site back online would be possible. Says Odio of his compliance with the takedown notice, "I regret having to do this. I may be able to put the site back online, but quite honestly it's unlikely because I can't afford a legal battle with Apple." Luckily for him, the EFF is now involved, so he will not have to worry with the legal fees.

Apple may only be protecting their very profitable iTunes business, but in this case, they're suggesting that the DMCA covers people merely talking about technical protection measures. If that's so, then as EFF says, "they've got a serious First Amendment problem."

You can follow this case's progress on the EFF's web site, Odio's blog, and on the iPodhash project's homepage.

The VimeoLand toy gives a look at recent happenings on Vimeo. VimeoLand displays an interactive landscape of characters that represent the latest actions from Vimeo users. Hovering your mouse over a character will display a pop-up containing one of the following recent actions:

• A comment
• A like
• Recent signup
• Recent upload

Each action includes a link to the profile of the user who completed the action and a link to the video that the action took place on. What's a little random and unique about VimeoLand is an airplane that flies back and forth above the landscape. Clicking the plane will cause a random video to be dropped from the plane's cargo. It's pretty nifty. Vimeo fans will find this particular toy to be very useful and entertaining.

Currently there's only one other toy available. If you're looking for something less flashy than VimeoLand, we recommend Pulse.

Making Your Own Vimeo Toy

We're interested in seeing what other unique visuals developers will create with Vimeo Toys. To help developers get started, Vimeo has listed a sample XML file with over 50 activity items to choose from. Vimeo's team of workers will decide whether or not your toy is worth being featured on Vimeo. While this isn't a problem for us, we'd rather see the community take a vote on what stays and what goes.

What we think would be really interesting to see is for Vimeo and developers to take things to the next level. By this we mean seeing a visual graph of what our friends, or a select group of users, are up as a Vimeo Toy. The current offerings are still a little too random for our tastes. Nevertheless, we're happy with what we see so far and look forward to see what else is next.

The first prediction is about the battle for users and mind-share that has emerged this year between Twitter and FriendFeed.

Some early adopters of Twitter have migrated to FriendFeed due to Twitter's outages. However, as of May 2008, Compete counts only 304,574 monthly U.S. visitors for FriendFeed versus 1.725 million for Twitter. So we're asking:

How many monthly U.S. visitors will FriendFeed have for July 2008 according to Compete?

What do you think? Make your prediction and check out what other RWW readers think will happen.

A number of analysts expect Firefox to capture a 20% market share this month and if the downloads for Firefox 3 are any indication, Mozilla might indeed be getting close to this. Here on ReadWriteWeb, more than 50% of our readers already use Firefox.

While quite a few extensions didn't yet work with Firefox 3 when it was released, most developers have made their plugins compatible with Firefox by now.

Microsoft is expected to release the next beta of its Internet Explorer by August 2008, though the time for the final release isn't quite clear yet. Last month, Opera also upgraded its browser to version 9.5, which garnered a number of favorable reviews.

It seems odd that Microsoft would (at least at first) exclusively sell this package through Circuit City. There doesn't seem to be any good reason to restrict the sale of Equipt to just one retailer, unless Microsoft is just trying to test the waters here to see how the public will react to a subscription service. While software subscriptions are common in the business market, consumers are used to buying their software outright, with maybe the exception of anti-virus software, which might explain the combination of OneCare and Office.

For users who already subscribe to OneCare at $49.95 a year, Equipt is a bargain at only $20 more a year. Subscribing to Equipt just for the Office package, though, might be less of a deal, especially given that Microsoft doesn't always upgrade Office every two years and that most users don't always need to have the latest version of MS Office.

Equipt clearly points in the direction that Microsoft wants to be going with software subscriptions - the question will be if mainstream users are ready.]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_equipt_office_and_on.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_equipt_office_and_on.php News Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:47:30 -0800 Frederic Lardinois