"if all ISPs in the UK staged a strike by cutting Internet access everywhere for two or three days and claim that would be the only possible way to ensure their customers aren't pirating anything, I am sure that the outrage would force another look at the law. And if they did this 2 different times, like once on Thursday Friday and Saturday, it could cause direct deposit information and payroll services to be interrupted. If they did this on again a week later on lets say Monday and Tuesday, there would be so much upset and confusion that those who think they wasn't effected will be."

"Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It’s the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet. Politicians who play for the antipiracy team should be aware that they have allied themselves with a special interest that is never satisfied and that will always demand that we take additional steps toward the ultimate control state. Today they want to transform the Internet Service Providers into an online police force, and the Antipiracy Bureau wants the authority for themselves to extract the identities of file sharers. Then they can drag the 15-year-old girl who downloaded a Britney Spears song to civil court and sue her."

"One of the world's most-used pirate film websites has been closed after providing links to illegal versions of major Hollywood hits and TV shows.

The first closure of a major UK-based pirate site was also accompanied by raids and an arrest, the anti-piracy group Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact) said today.

A 26-year-old man from Cheltenham was arrested on Thursday in connection with offences relating to the facilitation of copyright infringement on the internet, Fact said.

Fact claims that tv-links.co.uk was providing links to illegal film content that had been camcorder recorded from cinemas and then uploaded to the internet. The site also provided links to TV shows that were being illegally distributed."

- guardian.co.uk

If IPRED2 passes in its current form, "aiding, abetting, or inciting" copyright infringement on a "commercial scale" in the EU will become a crime.

Penalties for these brand new copycrimes will include permanent bans on doing business, seizure of assets, criminal records, and fines of up to €100,000.

IPRED2's backers say these copycrimes are meant only for professional criminals selling fake merchandise. But Europe already has laws against these fraudsters. With many terms in IPRED2 left unclear or completeley undefined - including "commercial scale" and "incitement" - IPRED2 will expand police authority and make suspects out of legitimate consumers and businesses, slowing innovation and limiting your digital rights.
- copycrime.eu

"His vision was spherical, as though a single retina lined the inner surface of a globe that contained all things, if all things could be counted. And here things could be counted, each one."

Sun has made recent announcements about their openDRM project. In my view, they've made some commitments that are important for any DRM project. E.g., as I've seen it described, it would be implemented to allow individuals to assert "fair use," and unlock DRM'd content, with a tag to trace misuse. And they've described a platform upon which authors keep the freedom to turn the DRM off, and more the content from the secured platform.

These are good things. But some confuse praise for better DRM with praise for DRM. So let me be as clear as possible here (though saying the same thing I've always said): We should be building a DRM-free world. We should have laws that encouraged a DRM-free world. We should demonstrate practices that make compelling a DRM-free world. All of that should, I thought, be clear. But just as one can hate the Sonny Bono Act, but think, if there's a Sonny Bono Act, there should also be a Public Domain Enhancement Act, so too can one hate DRM, but think that if there’s DRM, it should be at least as Sun is saying it should be.

None of the material in the story -- the stuff about microwave blasters or radio frequency jammers -- was classified, he admitted. Most of it had been taken from open source materials. And many of the systems were years and years from being fielded. But by bundling it all together, I was doing a "world class job of doing the enemy's research for him, for free." So watch your step, he said, as I went back to my ride-alongs with the Baghdad Bomb Squad -- the American soldiers defusing IEDs in the area. [Noah Shachtman - defensetech.org]

A draft memo prepared for Gordon England, the deputy defense secretary, would impose strict limits on all exchanges of information on improvised explosive devices and efforts to defeat them. This includes a mandate that all requests for information from journalists regarding IED threats and IED defeat efforts be routed through public affairs offices, according to a copy of the memo.

The policy would also require entire new discipline on exchanging information related to IED efforts across the government, academia and industry.

"Preserving information security is a critical component to winning this war and protecting the lives of our service members," states the draft memo. "We must protect sensitive information and deny our enemies easy access to critical intelligence." [military.com]

Software such as BitTorrent makes pirated material easy to download, episodic TV ensures a fresh supply of content and the popularity of devices such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod creates an appetite for video.

"In the same way that the original Napster was synonymous in the minds of virtually everyone who used it with free music, today if you say 'BitTorrent,' they're thinking television," said Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne, a research firm that tracks online traffic. "Even people who are not eye-patch-wearing pirates think nothing of grabbing a show from BitTorrent."

In fact, some people now use file sharing as a source of on-demand programming, outpacing the industry's efforts to set up their own pay-for-view services. Instead of programming a VCR or digital video recorder to record the latest episode of FX's "Nip/Tuck," these users simply download it the next day.

Clicking the mouse instead of the remote has dramatic implications for the TV industry.

Producers of popular programs often take in as much as a third of their revenue from foreign sales - a pot of money that would presumably evaporate if overseas downloading catches on. [latimes.com]

No one has to pay for numbers anymore. No one is threatened for merely experiencing the development of their own culture. No one is sued for participating in its creation or propagation. The old media business models are gone, burned away by their total inability to adapt to the reality of new technology. In the end they simply failed to comprehend that any product which can be reproduced endlessly by anyone at virtually no cost has, in any reasonable estimation, a market value of zero. Trying to break the technology that threatened them was the final desperate tactic - it hadn't stopped the Industrial Revolution and it didn't stop this one.

Copyright is your right to copy... anything. You are permitted to duplicate, to alter, to republish any piece of information, any text, sound, image or source code, even any object, anything that does not impinge on the privacy of another individual. It even protects your right to make money out of such duplication, if you can. In non-profit situations it also supersedes the now very limited and expensive application of patents. About the only right retained by an artist after they have released a work is their moral right to attribution. So don't get carried away, fraud, forgery and counterfeiting are still crimes.

Like all the technology in your home, your computer and everything on it is your own, down to the last resistor, the last byte. Ironically it still runs Windows. The old proprietary OS has been rebuilt into dozens of open source flavours - there was no point throwing out codes and standards with years of work behind them and such a vast catalogue of useful applications already developed. Even more unexpected is that Trusted Computing has become universal. The technology that would have allowed big business to monitor your activity, to reach into your home and control your computer and your data, is now used to stop just that kind of interference. Encrypted drives, curtained memory and protected media paths prevent malware snooping on your personal files or siphoning away your home movies. Ubiquitous VoIP, secured by privacy amplified encryption, means the national security agencies of the world have to actually investigate threats instead of sitting around waiting for potential suspects to blurt incriminating evidence over illegal wiretaps.

Your culture is faster and more fluid than it has ever been, or ever could have been had the rules not changed, you'll only ever experience a tiny fraction of it in your lifetime. The new movie you glimpsed playing on the back of someone's animated t-shirt at the bus stop last week has already spawned a handful of mash-ups and parodies, by next month the spreading ripples of its influence will be unrecognisable. Even then, if the feeds do not provide what you're looking for, there are the vast peer-distributed media libraries from which you can retrieve almost anything that has ever been digitised, any talk show or radio play, video game or comic, newspaper article or published photograph.

Time and space shifting of media is the norm rather than the hard won exception. You rarely notice the exact source of the information and entertainment you receive, it may have come through the traditional broadcast television channels, via the manifold multimedia blogs piped through your fibre optic Internet connection or picked up virally from wireless peers by your personal server while walking down the street. You rely on your intelligent agent to filter this never-ending flow of information, an application that reduces and organises the mass of live data to a few dynamic feeds, constantly adjusted to match your profile, habits and even your mood. But still, there is so much material even this system has to co-operate with others on local networks to process it all.

With free and instant access to every book ever written there is little use for bookshops, the few that are left sell limited ranges of bound paper works as charming novelties. Often those buying them are just doing so to get their favourite author's signature. For those who miss the feel of a real book but want access to more than the few pulp prints in the shops there are 'magic books' with simulated bindings, touch sensitive e-Ink pages and voice interaction to let them summon an approximation of any volume ever written. The primary functions of public libraries today are the maintenance of municipal servers in the back rooms, used to ensure that less frequented material is never lost from the peer networks, and public access to the Internet for those who might find themselves without a mobile device. The stacks are now roped-off museum exhibits.

You just don't see physical media anymore. Awkward, low-end portable storage like CDs and DVDs are rarely useful, not with ever-increasing bandwidth availability, and not without the requirement to divide culture up into tradable units, the need to trick consumers with physical objects in exchange for their money and their rights. Blu-ray and HD-DVD, their technology moulded to constrict the hold on consumers, never had a chance, too rapidly overtaken by faster, more versatile and more open live storage devices.

The cinema chains have been decimated. Those that persist cater to customers who seek an authentic movie theatre experience. You'll often find movie sponsors subsidising tickets, food and drink sales in return for screenings of 'official' versions of films, desperate to have their product placements seen by audiences in a controlled environment. You often find yourself return to really good movie again and again, drawn by dynamic content generation and commissioned extensions. There's no point banning cameras and threatening legal action, the movie doesn't need to be protected, quite the opposite, and almost everyone there has already seen it. When you walk into a cinema you probably have versions of all the latest films stored in your inside pocket, if you don't you can download them from the cinema's own server as you're watching, or access countless other titles through the powerful ad-hoc networks that settle invisibly over any significant gathering of people.

Outside of the cinemas there is little notion of viewing anything in any particular place, time or order, no way for anyone to dictate or even guess how you listen to your music or watch your news. Instead of a contest advertising has become a war. Average consumers are given the tools to strip away the old style commercial breaks and sponsor messages, tools that would have been illegal had DRM been allowed to develop unchecked.

Increasingly companies rely on getting information about their products integrated into the media, making them inseparable. You won't find a new album online that doesn't contain at least two tracks named after brands of sneakers or snack foods. The rewards for a rapper willing to name a financial services company somewhere in their lyrics are awe-inspiring - a once-off commercial concession like that can fund a popular artist for long time. Your favourite comedy sketch vlog regularly uses humour based on commercial products and services - a few years ago such a thing might have appalled you, yet you still see collections of old TV ads in the media libraries prominently tagged as humour. The Grand Theft Auto MMOG doesn't charge it's players for software or access, instead it sells in-game billboard space for fifty times the price of billboards in the real world, and the virtual cars the players are boosting will often be the latest models, performance and polygon counts boosted by higher paying sponsors, of course. Armed with suitable Creative Commons Contracts, protecting them from restrictive and exploitative deals, artists have little to fear from their sponsors.

The old copyright system did nothing to protect the right of artists and everything to protect the profit margins of the content industries. It might have been argued that without laws to protect artists, and companies to represent their interests, anyone could co-opt their work to use for advertising without rewarding them. But every company that considers such a tactic today must consider a simply question, is it worth more to make an enemy of an artist than to make a friend of one? Ultimately it must be conceded that artists of all forms are the mind and the voice of the world. Unfettered by exploitation and constant resistance, they hold the attention of all humanity. Disrespecting them is never going to be a good idea.

Going to the movies is not what it used to be. Security at the studio-owned theatres is heavy, it's not a trip to be taken lightly. But if you want to see the film everyone is talking about without waiting a year for the home release, you have little choice. When you enter the lobby the first thing you see are long ranks of tiny, thumbprint activated lockers. This is where you must leave all of your electronics, your personal server and peripherals, even your watch, and you had better not be wearing smart spectacles or contacts. As you enter the security zone you're scanned for anything you may have forgotten. Cochlea and optical implants must be capable of responding with a coded RF identification signal to indicate their systems are secure and cannot record. People with older models, or models implanted abroad where such interrogation is illegal, are turned away. Perhaps they would like to see one of the older releases? Once through the scanner you must submit to a biometric ID test - this is where the known bloggers, hackers and spoilers are ejected. Finally there is the non-disclosure agreement to be signed - these days most moviegoers choose to sign via the MPAAs annual subscription, just trying to take some of the hassle out of visiting the cinema. Finally you get to see the film. In the auditorium the audience is constantly scanned by an AI looking for suspicious activity, so don't rummage in your pockets for too long. It's strange that all this effort to protect the movie industry has done so little to improve the movies.

You don't really own your home computer, or even the data you keep on it. Oh, you paid for it, just like you paid for the fibre-optic Internet connection that it can't function without, but now it squats under your TV using your electricity and does more work for the content industry than for you. The nightly security patches it downloads for itself don't secure your computer against attackers, they secure the system and software against you. TV-on-demand seemed like a dream come true when you first opted in and upgraded all your hardware, but the slowly encroaching charges are becoming a disincentive to turn on at all. Sometimes the last episode of a series makes up 50% of the cost of the whole season.

The Internet is not what it used to be. It's expanded, naturally, the technology giving everyone mobile PCs with vast ad-hoc networking capabilities, it's faster, more efficient, and more available, but it's also more restrictive. Since the ISPs were made responsible for the content they deliver their filtering has become neurotic. Anti-terror, piracy, plagiarism and libel filters search every request and response for signs of illegal activity, always erring on the side of caution. Wikipedia's index has been decimated. Popular blogs like Boing Boing now have more lawyers involved than contributors (the one's that have survived that is). Even if you managed to get something illegal through the filters your operating system's regularly updated self-check mechanisms would eventually root it out, or report you to the authorities, usually both.

These days it seems like every time you turn on one of your gadgets you have to fight with its DRM to get it to do what you want. The home movie of your daughter opening her birthday presents is ruined by a patch of grey fog that shifts with every movement of the camera, tracking sluggishly to keep the TV screen in the background obscured. From the codes embedded in TV's update pattern your camera had decided the show was not licensed for this form of reproduction and blocked it. You wish you had thought to turn it off at the time, but squinting into the camera's tiny screen it hadn't looked so bad.

Even once recorded, your own media is not safe. Everything is stored on your home PC, trapped in the solid-state drive's proprietary filing system. Once there, the only reasonable way to transfer it is to another trusted drive from the same vendor - the DRM won't recognise any other brand of mass storage device. In the meantime the PC constantly searches your files looking for illegal material. A recent security patch has destroyed the last video of your father. According to the email report you received that same morning the latest video and photographic scanning protocols had decided something seen in the footage resembled a new government building, the appearance of which is now classified. You know for sure that there is no such building in the footage, it was all filmed in the old man's living room. But there's no way for you to prove that with the offending shots turned to grey fog.

You just don't see physical media anymore. Too easily duplicated, their security too easily cracked, they've been dropped in favour of heavily encrypted and vendor-locked streaming media. You don't 'own' copies of any music or movies these days, instead your monthly subscriptions grant you only the right to temporarily buffer a few seconds of the distributor's authorised files while you watch or listen. Ultimately, that was the reason ad-hoc networking protocols and mobile PC technologies were pushed so hard, not because the customers wanted them but because the music and movie industries needed them to replace the vulnerable duplication method normally needed for such mobile media.

Physical bookshops are a novelty now; they only sell works that are in the public domain, and only to a few die-hard paper enthusiasts. Their prices rise steadily as demand drops and the printing and binding industry falters. Tightened regulation has made it illegal to sell second hand books that are still under copyright - the bookshops will sometimes give the customer a few cents for old books, part of a commission they receive for sending them off to be destroyed by the publishers. Public libraries have almost disappeared - unable to adapt to an environment where more and more books were only available in locked digital formats, they were forced to close all but the largest repositories - and even those are rapidly becoming obsolete. The last book you tried to download to you eReader turned out to be incompatible. The latest novels are now being streamed as well, one page at a time, and you'll have to buy a new reader that supports wireless quantum encryption. It seems odd that you're old enough to remember when photocopiers were still legal.

The only way writers can get their novels read, or musicians have their music heard, is by signing with a content provider who will claim the work as their own and charge people for access. It's nearly impossible for artists to make money anymore. The celebrities you read about, the millionaires who's contribution to the industry was actually rewarded, are a microscopic minority. But wasn't it always that way? There is nothing to stop an author from reading a work aloud in public, or a band from performing to a live audience, but few beyond that space will hear it. Hardly anyone has access to the technology that would let them record what they're hearing, at least not in any permanent form, and even fewer have the means to share it once they have. And god forbid the artists accidentally use a sentence or lyric already claimed by one of the corporations...

Somewhere out there, hackers and open-source software programmers are still working, beleaguered by diminishing supplies of usable hardware, ever tighter controls on imports and the furious unflinching eye of the authorities. They are constantly interrogated, their work searched for copyright and patent infringements, for any new technologies the content providers and national security services can't control. They can write competitive applications, they can make the systems work faster, more efficiently, if they weren't so fearful, they could make it free. What they can't do is tell anyone that needs to know.

US INVESTIGATORS, including CIA agents, will be allowed interrogate Irish citizens on Irish soil in total secrecy, under an agreement signed between Ireland and the US last week.

Suspects will also have to give testimony and allow property to be searched and seized even if what the suspect is accused of is not a crime in Ireland.

irishexaminer.com