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UK Government Under the Control of Hollywood [Feb. 22nd, 2008|10:18 pm]
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You may have noticed that the UK government is, with the kind assistance of Andrew Burnham MP of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, is bowing to Hollywood and the record labels' various enforcement groups, essentially handing them the power to control the uses that UK citizens may make of their internet connections. ISPs have been given until April 2009 to comply with new regulations that will force them to inspect all data transferred through their systems and magically deduce whether or not it involves the sharing of copyrighted material. In the event that sharing is suspected (nothing more is required) the ISP subscriber will receive a strike against them, if they receive three strikes their internet service will be terminated.

No allowances have been made for the technological requirements for deep packet inspection of all traffic that passes through a service providers system. It may safely be presumed that the customers will end up paying extra to have their private data transmissions intercepted and analysed. I have yet to find any comment form Burnham on the morality of cutting off an innocent user when someone else who makes use of the same connection is suspected of sharing - if one family member breaks the rules then everyone in that household loses access this increasingly essential communications service. Nor have I seen any indication from those involved that they have any understanding of the encryption arms race they are about to enter and immediately lose - that will be an awful lot of money spent and trouble caused for a system that will be worked around before it is even put in place. Naturally there is no hint of how the ISP's are to identify copyrighted works from any other shared files. And what are the procedures for proving one's innocence? How does someone with a strike based on a suspicion show that they are not guilty of sharing (baring in mind the technical hurdles already involved in proving positive proof of sharing).

The most sensible response I have heard comes from a Slashdot commenter:

"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."


Personally I will be happy to lose access for a few days if it will do anything to prevent this travesty from going any further. Frankly, the harm done to individual users will not even register compared to the harm done to UK financial sector, not least the content industry. They must learn that the environment has changed and all the legislation in the world cannot change it back. Technology has moved forward and they have failed to follow. Their demise is inevitable, and is only hastened by making enemies of us all.
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The Only Solution [Jan. 11th, 2008|03:18 pm]
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A growing number of Swedish MPs are questioning the logic and legality of the recording industry targeting file sharers and forcing ISPs to help identify them. They have a simple and obvious solution that many of us will find familiar:

"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."


Those of us with any insight into the industry already knew that this had gone too far, that the recording industry was seeking powers far beyond those required for commerce and that such grasping power-hungry manoeuvring was a sing of bad things to come. Now it seems they have finally push hard enough to raise the heckles of more than a few politicians. Six members of the Swedish Moderate Party drafted the article quoted above taking into account some uncomfortable questions from various government bodies including the Data Inspection Board and The Competition Authority. It draws attention to the issues of privacy, authority, due process and human rights. Since it's publication support has continued to grow and a second article has been signed by 13 members of the Swedish parliament.

Finally there are politicians who are walking into this argument with open eyes instead of overstuffed wallets. Hopefully this movement will produce something akin to reasonable and workable legislation in Sweden, something that protects private citizens and forces the recoding industry to accept that it no longer has a place in the modern world. With a little more luck, such common sense thinking will prove infectious and we will start to see this attitude spread to the rest of Europe.
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Glitch [Dec. 5th, 2007|10:49 pm]
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Listen, Glick, the movie industry is already doing the one thing that guarantees I will never illegally download their 'products', namely they are now making such deficient, low-brow, half-assed, worthless, over-hyped, over-funded, overwritten, sub intellectual, inadequate, substandard, ridiculous, inferior, scoff-worthy, malodorous, cringe-making, mismanaged, shoddy, insufferable, incompetent and defective low-com-dom crap, that I would never ever even consider wasting one single byte of my precious bandwidth on any of it. I would be perfectly happy to see every last bit of your meritless trash forever erased from the internet were it not for the fact that you are trying to do it by introducing a radically disproportionate mechanism: ending Network Neutrality!

Don't cover your ears Glickster, you need to hear this: Shrek 3 is not important enough to bring an end to our freedom. The only reason the movie industry can say it's losing money now is because they spent way too much on producing something that nobody actually needs and nobody really wants. The Western World will not crumble because they can't turn a profit, but it might if we lose the integrity and security of the single most important communications tool in history.

One way or another the IP delusional industries are one the way out. It's only a matter of time before the average consumer figures out that their 'entertainment' just isn't worth it any more, that the busker on the street outside the cinema is a hell of lot more creative, interesting and memorable than the claptrap movie they just walked out of. How long do you think they'll watch their technology subverted, their personal data ransacked, their legally purchased media disintegrating, and their communications tapped and blocked before they think: "But I didn't even like the Bourne Appendectomy!"

Anyone invested in the movie or recording industries with even an iota of common sense should be selling up now, while their stock is still worth the ferromagnetic material it's stored on. You know it can't go on like this. It just isn't reasonable in consider this a survivable scenario for anyone involved. I mean it. Get out now. This is going to end badly, and you know it.

Glicky, you are not adding to our culture in any positive way beyond uniting the rest of us against you. You are not curing any horrible diseases. You are not on a crusade of righteousness. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are not welcome here.
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KISS Off [Nov. 17th, 2007|03:39 pm]
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I have never been a fan of KISS, and I never will be thanks to the enlightened opinions of Mr. Gene Simmons:

"The record industry doesn't have a f---ing clue how to make money. It's only their fault for letting foxes get into the henhouse and then wondering why there's no eggs or chickens. Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid's face should have been sued off the face of the earth. They should have taken their houses and cars and nipped it right there in the beginning. Those kids are putting 100,000 to a million people out of work. How can you pick on them? They've got freckles. That's a crook. He may as well be wearing a bandit's mask."

'Gene Simmons: college kids killed music biz' reuters.com


Sued off the face of the earth? Have their homes and cars taken? I have to wonder if there are actually any 'kids' who would now admit to downloading a Kiss track but, Mr Simmons, do you really want them punished for seeking out your music? Do you think this will make them want to pay for anything you produce ever again?

And if we need any more evidence that this is the drivelous spoutings of a narrow-minded, over-paid half-wit we are presented at the end with this little gem:

"The only reason why gold is expensive is because we all agree that it is. There's no real use for it, except we all agree and abide by the idea that gold costs a certain amount per ounce. As soon as you give people the choice to deviate from it, you have chaos and anarchy. And that's what going on."

'Gene Simmons: college kids killed music biz' reuters.com


... I... I don't even know where to start! Mr. Simmons, gold is expensive because it is extremely useful and attractive while at the same time being VERY RARE. Sure we could all decide that it's worth a lot less but that will just make it harder to come by because getting it out of the ground will become less profitable.

Music, Mr. Simmons, even yours unfortunately, is infinitely abundant, it can be reproduced endlessly and distributed globally at virtually no cost. It's as though music covers the streets like dirt, clogging gutters, and getting trodden unintentionally into people's homes, yet we have this ridiculous system that makes it illegal to bend down and pick any of it up. Bottom line: the monetary value of anything, including music, is inversely proportional to it's availability, if it is infinitely abundant then it's monetary value is indistinguishable from zero.

"As soon as you give people the choice to deviate from it, you have chaos and anarchy." Seriously Mr. Simmons, could you be any more establishment?

I want to see artists honoured for their success, given something that proportionally rewards their contribution to our culture. But this cannot be at the expense of our freedom to participate in that culture, the ability to use our own technology as we see fit and to remain secure in our private matters. That is why I back the concept of a Independent Democratic Blanket License, to free ourselves and support our artists. Yes, change can be scary, it will cost jobs, but it will also create new jobs, whole new business models even. Think of all the cool new media and networking technology we will be designing, building, selling and buying when we can share media without fear for our liberty. Think of all the artists who aren't even given a chance in today's market who could get their music to people's ears and get paid for it through the IDBL. Artists are not the enemy, we're fighting for their freedom too.

So, Mr. Gene "Doesn't have a f---ing clue" Simmons, get your wise on, right now, or we're leaving you behind.
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The Blanket License: A Modest Proposal [Oct. 25th, 2007|05:11 pm]
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According to a report from ArsTechnica the fabled Blanket License has once again reared its head, this time in Denmark:

Andy Oram over at O'Reilly Radar noted the recent moves in Denmark to create a system where every ISP user might pay a monthly fee in order to access unlimited P2P music legally.

The proposal has drawn positive feedback from an unlikely source—the local "Piratgruppen."

"It's good that they admit that they cannot solve the problem of falling CD sales by suing their own fans," said Sebastian Gjerding from the Piratgruppen. "It looks like they have understood that they should offer something that is competitive compared to other, free music sources. It is an entirely new admission that hasn't spread internationally yet. IFPI Denmark is on the forefront in this matter. But it is annoying that no action has been taken so far to save many teenagers million-krone fines."

ArsTechnica.com


The article notes some obstacles to the proposal. For instance, will this cover just 'local' bands or include international sources? The former would simply prove unenforceable - they'd have less luck detecting where they were downloading from than they currently have detecting if they have downloaded anything at all - while the latter would be a logistical zombie movie complete with everyone dying at the end! Another question is whether this will be a voluntary payment or amount to a tax on all users regardless of whether they ever download music or not?

Despite these sorts of issues, I consider the Blanket License to be the most equitable and, more importantly, most moral alternative to the current media distribution model. Fundamentally it is a concept that makes the most of current technology and encourages further development, while at the same time protecting our right to make use of our own hardware and data.

The problems mentioned in the article are trivial. Yes, the BL should cover artists worldwide but it should be stipulated that they make the claim to receive anything. Yes, the BL should be a mandatory payment, including for businesses - they don't want to make use of it, that's up to them, but since it's there why not let their employees share media on their network without a legal care in the world?

My main problem with the Danish plan is its hopelessly narrow vision, covering only music and only one country. It is comically ineffectual.

Here's the real plan:

The Blanket License should cover all media, it should, in fact, cover anything that can be encoded, uploaded, downloaded or otherwise redistributed, music, movies, TV shows, books, newspapers, 3d printer files, essentially any media that can be rendered as data. It should be run as an opt-in for content creators alone and strictly prohibit music cartels, charities and other non-root content providers. It should also provide a means for those artists who build on the work of others to indicate and reward their contributors.

But there is one element that is by far the most important: the Blanket License must be directly democratic. By this I mean that the distribution of the revenue derived from the BL should be based on what the users are listening to, watching and using, not on some even division or some educated guess informed by random polling. We should literally be voting for our choices and the results of these votes used to calculate the creators' share.s Of course one vote a week is hardly going to be a fair measure, instead we would need at least a hundred votes a week which we could distribute as we see fit (say a maximum of five votes per voter for any one creator). This voting could allow for a mix of voluntary voting (specific choices regardless of what a user has actually downloaded) and user-controlled automated voting (a system that allows vote assignments based on the usage statistics from a media player). No one would be forced to vote, but it would be in their interests to encourage their favourite bands, actors photographers, writers and so on, and automatic voting could allow users to contribute without any real effort.

There will still be a place for record labels as marketing brokers, contracting artists for flat fees or a percentage of their earnings in return for their expertise in development and marketing their creations.

This real Blanket License would be no small undertaking, requiring the development of an international infrastructure and region-by-region legislation to remove the existing legal hurdles faced by users. But the result would be a totally egalitarian forum, the likes of which has not been seen since some mug took a handful of loose change and sang to a wax cylinder. All that would be required for an artist to make money would be to make music and find people who like it enough to vote for it, no contracts, no physical distribution, and most significantly, no risk.


It's ambitious, and naturally it glosses over some real problems. Technically, there are issues with the security involved in electronic voting, ensuring that the votes are genuine rather than the result of malicious software running on client systems, and preventing any third party from accessing usage data and putting user privacy at risk (a premise I call Regime Proofing - designing the system so that should it fall under someone else's control there will not be enough information recorded to identify individual users, though there should still be enough to identify tampering and vandalism [a paradox, I know]). And naturally the entire system would need to be totally transparent if it is to be trusted by artists and consumers.

The environment that this Blanket License could create is an exciting one. It would encourage a far greater range of cultural experience for users, exposing them to a vast library of content without restriction and without the increasingly hegemonic filtering of the incumbent distribution businesses. Since each user has already paid for all their downloading there can be none of this quibbling over the rights involved in time- and format-shifting. Download once and the data is yours to do with as you please., you will be free to invent new ways of accessing your culture that have yet to be even dreamed of, and without fear of the shadow of monetisation.

Radiohead's independent venture into alternative digital distribution model was laudable, a worthy experiment, but one dependant on the duality of our current attitude to online media, both legal and illicit. What they received for their effort was charity: not a long term solution, but a round of applause for a worthy effort. In the end we cannot expect to support artists through benevolence alone. How many 'micro-patrons' can we expect to find and persuade to keep giving? Radiohead simply walked out into a new and forbidding wilderness, if anyone is going to follow, we're going to need to build them some roads.

I've previously discussed the impact of unlimited digital distribution on the existing content industry, namely the rapid and near total destruction of physical production interests. Other commentators have suggested that such a vision is unnecessarily apocalyptic, that, for instance, paper books will never disappear, and to an extent I agree. But consider a world in which you can access any book, at any time, for free; can we really expect already struggling publishers to survive that? There will always be a market for dead tree, just as there is still a market for vinyl, but there will also be a reckoning in the market that will see it reduced to little more than a niche. Now consider this situation extended to cover not only book sellers, but music stores, tv stations, cinemas and all the services that depend on them. A whole set of industries is at stake, countless jobs, and a huge chunk of the Western economy.

The Blanket License promises an almost unimaginable upheaval in the 'business of culture', a vision that the entrenched business interests will likely do anything to escape. But consider also that the openness it could bring will foster new technologies and new businesses to exploit those technologies and even new ways of doing business - the economic environment might then be changed rather than destroyed.

I am convinced that, if we are to avoid handing over control of our lives to big business, then this is the way it must be. It is the Blanket License or (without exaggeration) cultural totalitarianism.
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Linking a Crime - It are a FACT [Oct. 19th, 2007|10:42 pm]
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The Guardian is gleefully frothing over the arrest of a web site owner for allowing visitors to download infringing content [they even trot out that old Lost Sales gag, I expect then to start discussing internet tubes any moment now]. But as with almost all of these cases things are not so clearly defined:

"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


Yes, you read that correctly, the site was "providing links" to "illegal film content". This site itself contained nothing illegal, there was no copyrighted content available there, it was not possible to upload or download such content to its server. If there's nothing illegal then there is no crime, if there is no crime then the "26-year-old man from Cheltenham" is innocent. I hope 26yomfC has a a decent, IT-savvy lawyer because this could not only put him in enough cash to keep him comfy for a long time but also protect www.tv-links.co.uk from any future prosecutions.

The issue here is the difference between performing an illegal act and describing one. The TV Links site merely described the locations and methods of acquisition for infringing content, it did not actually perform the infringement. By that same token, any author of a novel that describes a murder should be arrested for murder. Anyone who shows a policeman the location of a stolen car should be arrested for stealing it [yeah, I know, 'car analogy'].

Let's run with that last one: if anything this site was a useful tool for IP delusionals, showing them exactly where to find the actual infringing sites and torrents, happily revealed to them by the very people that so plague them. As a resource you would think it far more valuable than a single highly questionable arrest.

Once again these people have succeeded in pissing me off. Remember to use the Bad Guy Sticker greasemonkey tool while browsing Amazon to help you avoid purchasing products from members of FACT. Give these idiots your money and it will be used to harm your rights, prevent you from using your own tools and content, and to restrict your access to your own culture.
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Untraceable P2P? [Sep. 11th, 2007|04:27 pm]
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This is a story from BBC News about the Swedish company TerraNet that wants to introduce ad-hoc networking to mobile phone technology. The endeavour is aimed at offering the developing world free communications over an ever-expanding network limited only be the number of handsets in range:

"The TerraNet technology works using handsets adapted to work as peers that can route data or calls for other phones in the network.

The handsets also serve as nodes between other handsets, extending the reach of the entire system. Each handset has an effective range of about one kilometre.

This collaborative routing of calls means there is no cost to talk between handsets.

When a TerraNet phone is switched on, it begins to look for other phones within range. If it finds them, it starts to connect and extend the radio network.

When a number is dialled a handset checks to see if the person being called is within range. If they are, the call goes through.

While individually the phones only have a maximum range of 1km, any phone in between two others can forward calls, allowing the distance to double. This principle applied many times creates a mini network."


It would be interesting to see this technology used for untraceable communications and file-sharing, providing an ephemeral and inherently neutral network of potentially anonymous nodes, immune to state control and far, far beyond the reach of the RIAA, MPAA, and other IP delusionals.
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Poisoned Chalace [May. 31st, 2007|01:34 pm]
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A pessimist gains no greater pleasure than being able to say "I told you so!"

"With great power comes great responsibility, and apparently with DRM-free music comes files embedded with identifying information. Such is the situation with Apple's new DRM-free music: songs sold without DRM still have a user's full name and account e-mail embedded in them, which means that dropping that new DRM-free song on your favorite P2P network could come back to bite you."

- ArsTechnica.com

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Rebranding [Apr. 17th, 2007|04:10 pm]
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Piratechnic Brand Logo
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iPRED2 [Apr. 12th, 2007|06:15 pm]
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I hope you will take a moment to go sign this petition against the Second Intellectual Property Enforcement Directive (IPRED2) which is due to go before the European Parliament on April 24th:

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


Besides the fact that we simply do not need any more IP law (really, we need far, far less) the wording of this directing is vague to the point of disingenuousness. Personally I would give the phrase "commercial scale" as much meaning is as "square scale" or "red scale". It leaves the door wide open for interpretation in the effort to punish this newly invented crime.

If you physically copy a CD and give it to an acquaintance, and they then use that CD to create a hundred thousand copies to sell for profit, does that mean you are guilty of 'aiding commercial scale IP infringement"? What if you happen to show up in the same P2P swarm as someone downloading a movie with the intention of making physical copies to sell?

How many copyfight oriented forums and personal blogs out there, including this one, might be considered "incitement" because of their anti-copyright, pro file-sharing stance? I hope the doom9 folks have their ID trails thoroughly obfuscated since their attempts to return our fair use rights are easily interpreted by this directive as aiding, abetting and inciting. Who knows if this law could be used to criminalise something as simple as describing the means to circumvent DRM (like burning iTunes tracks to audio CD then ripping them back into an open format).

Will hardware manufacturers now face criminal investigation for creating devices that might be used in the commission of a crime (where a weapons manufacturer would get off scot-free)? Is this nothing more than a way for the recording industry to persuade hardware developers to sell broken machines?

This directive may be aimed at large scale criminal activity but with language like this it is nothing more than a dragnet for IP-delusional companies and their equally deranged legal departments. Rather than having to pursue civil cases all they have to do is report infringement and present themselves as victims and witnesses.

So-called IP infringement is so simple today that it requires no significant knowledge, no more resources than a networked computer and no more criminal intent than two friends sharing their love of music, movies or any other expression of our culture.

If you do nothing else today, go sign that petition. Don't let bad laws come into force, and certainly not bad laws with such open and easily abused language.

Update: in their article, 'European ISPs: "Aiding and abetting" copyright violations could land our CEOs in jail', Ars Technica points out that recent amendments to the bill now suggests fair use exceptions to national laws and explicitly excludes "acts carried out by private users for personal and not for profits purposes". Good news. But that still leaves this directive with enough interpretive swing to throttle future technical innovations in information technology, to put increasing pressure on our internet service providers to limit our use of what is supposed to be a neutral network, and ultimately tighten the recording industry's grip on our culture.
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The Conspiracy Against Common Sense [Oct. 27th, 2006|04:02 pm]
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From Slashdot:

"The 23 year old Grant Stanley has been sentenced to five months in prison, followed by five months of home detention, and a $3000 fine for his role in the private BitTorrent tracker Elitetorrents. This ruling is the first BitTorrent related conviction in the US. Stanley pleaded guilty earlier this year to 'conspiracy to commit copyright infringement' and 'criminal copyright infringement.' He is one of the three defendants in the Elitetorrents operation better known as 'Operation D-Elite.'"


Basically, this man has been sent to jail for providing the means for others to infringe copyrights.

Lets look at some others who provide these "means":

VCR manufacturers give people the means to record television programmes without the permission of the copyright holders (or, if the UN has its way, the broadcaster's permission).

Web browser publishers give people the means to download copyrighted text, images and video from websites.

Manufacturers of CD players with integrated cassette recorders give people the means to make unauthorised copies of music (my old machine, tucked away in a cupboard now, even has an 'Easy CD Rec' button!). The same is true of those who produce radios with integrated cassette recorders (which begs the question: if these are actually legal then why is Creative retroactively stripping the radio recording functions from its Zen series of digital audio devices?).

Still camera manufacturers give people the means to duplicate artworks and other photographs without the creators' permission.

Video camera manufacturers allow people to record movies in cinemas entirely contrary to those threatening notices we are presented with at each visit.

I was going to suggest that we should also be locking up photocopier manufactures, but clearly it is the manufacturers of all printing equipment, from desktop to office-floor to full-scale printing presses who are guilty of providing the means to make unauthorised copies of printed works.

Hell, pencil manufacturers offer people a means to (very slowly) duplicate a literary work without the author's consent.

All manufacturers of computers, CDR and DVDR media, CD\DVD writing drives, HDs, thumb drives, video cassettes, digital video recorders, dictaphones, independent cassette recorders, all network interface cards, microphones, telephones, dial-up services, broadband services, carbon paper, paints and other art materials...


At this rate there will be no room in the prisons for all those murderers and rapists.

All facetiousness aside, it feels like we are approaching the end of something here...
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Bad Guy Sticker [Sep. 15th, 2006|01:52 am]
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There's been quite a bit of interesting copyfight news over on BoingBoing recently. Last week I was reading about Clayton Counts who released a mash-up of the classic Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band. And now this week, not only are EMI, the license holders of the album, trying to sue Clayton despite the fact that he has no money and made none from the mash-up, but they're also trying to sue everybody who heard his work too.

This displeases me.

I've cobbled together a new Greasemonkey script called 'Bad Guy Sticker' for use with the Amazon web site (and hopefully others with a bit of work).


When visiting a product page at Amazon this script will detect the 'label', 'studio' or 'publisher' field from the product's data and test it against a list of MPAA, RIAA, BPI and FACT members. If it finds a match, even a partial one, it will display a warning 'sticker' to let you know that money spent on this item will be used by the Bad Guys to harm your rights.

Example of Bad Guy Sticker for 20th Century Fox

When you give these idiots money they use it sue people based on nothing but a screen-cap of a p2p IP list, to sue artists who are simply and naturally building on existing culture, to lobby for the extension of copyrights so they can tighten their hold on your culture, to take away your right to control your own property by persuading hardware manufacturers to sell you broken machines, to limit the development of new technologies because it threatens their outmoded business models, to force other countries to submit to their so-called Intellectual Property laws regardless of their own positions, and to find new ways to prevent you from participating in your own culture.

You may think it unlikely that something as simple as not buying certain products could have any impact on this lamentable situation. But regardless of the outcome the question you really need to ask yourself is, can you, in good conscience, continue to fund these activities? Even for those who will continue to buy these products it is important to understand the consequences of doing so.

While using the Bad Guy Sticker you may begin to wonder if there is anything left to buy without losing sleep. Trust me, this sensation passes swiftly. The fact is that the vast majority of the stuff sold by these companies is utter shite and you really won't miss it when it's gone. There is plenty of entertainment available out there from independent and totally benign companies, and there is a whole world of free culture available online. You really don't need to be encouraging content slavery to enjoy yourself.

[ The script can be re-installed from the link above to update the member lists. Any suggestions on additions for the lists to improve matching are welcome, as are any suggestions on optimising and increasing the functionality of the script. I am releasing Bad Guy Sticker to the Public Domain - this is to make it clear that anyone who wishes may produce their own version using this code, for instance you might want to build lists tailored for your region and other online stores. ]
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Movielink: Outsourcing DVD Production to Customers [Jul. 18th, 2006|11:27 pm]
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Movielink.com, that paragon of modern media distribution, has introduced a new feature to their movie download service: burn your own DVDs.

[ I need to point out, from the start, that the Movielink site only accepts visitors in the US and is heavily dependant on IE. The required JScript does not seem to function through the proxies I've tried. As a result all the information I have on their service is second hand. I'm not trying to mislead anyone but if Movielink don't want to offer me accurate information about their products and services then I'm not going to lose sleep over any misinformation repeated here. ]

Their embarrassingly ill-conceived business model is based on having punters pay something close to the price of a new DVD just so they can spend X hours downloading a heavily DRMed, purportedly low quality movie or TV show. What they end up with are files that will only play in Windows Media or RealMedia Players running under later editions of Windows. Since the DRM prevents the material being transported to other devices or translated into a more useful format, this means that customers will also need a PC with TV Out, preferably within reach of a decent TV, to make real use of it. Is it any wonder that the service's backers are trying to ditch this dead weight already?

BusinessWeek has reported that five of the studios that bankrolled Movielink, including Paramount Pictures, Sony and Universal Studios, have begun looking for a buyer of the video-on-demand service.

"The studios aren't going to abandon (Movielink and CinemaNow) completely," said Josh Martin, a digital-media analyst. "But they realize those sites have limited appeal to say the least."


"Limited appeal", I suppose that's a diplomatic way of putting it. Well, now they think they can take the edge off this foul-tasting meal they've served up by giving customers the chance to create their own DVDs that can be used in a 'regular' DVD player. This is not signalling the end of their DRM, far from it. Movielink has cut a deal with the makers of the Roxio burning software to produce a system for creating DVDs that will carry the standard copy-protection and (one assumes) region-coding measures found on commercial discs. So, you pay the price of a new DVD, spend hours downloading content of questionable quality, and then have to set about turning it into a rapidly depreciating physical product yourself? And then you wonder if the local DVD retailer is really all that far away.

When you by a DVD (and god knows why you'd want to these days) there is a vast and complex industry behind that purchase, factories and machines and people and suppliers, the budget for which offers at least some excuse for the price. But downloading from a website is one of the least industrial method of distribution imaginable (second only to p2p), requiring minimal personal and resources, and probably costing more for bandwidth than anything else. By all rights this should be the cheapest way to get movies legally, especially considering the poor quality of the end result. Are we really surprised that movie studios see these savings in production and distribution as a potential increase profit margin rather than a potentially cheaper product?

If you 'steal' a copyrighted movie through p2p you actually get a better product than if you had purchased it legally, a movie that you can translate into any format, play on any platform and make further use of in any number of imaginative ways using a whole range of tools. This is only true of copy-protected products - a car doesn't become faster and more fuel efficient if you steal it, nor does a TV develop higher resolution and a clearer picture. The bottom line remains the same: the only thing that is going to tempt p2p users away from their free movies is legal movies of at least the same quality.

Right now, being 'stolen' is probably the last thing on Earth that can save the awful shit that passes for movies these days.

I think I'd be more impressed if Movielink offered a free movie script and sock puppets.
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Telefonica - The Silent Network [Jun. 29th, 2006|05:28 pm]
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A little flurry of mod-envy on /. is the herald of more IPD news from Spain (tmcnet.com).

It seems that Spanish lawmakers are going to ban "unauthorized peer-to-peer file-sharing" as they introduce the blank media levy. Whoop-de-doo, welcome to the world, you may cry. But there is a twist.

The arguments on /. have to do with the spin placed on the article by the poster suggesting that all P2P use is about to be banned. Remember those statistics from yesterday? - 90% of network traffic in Spain is Internet use and 80% of that is P2P, and any guess on the level of P2P traffic that is "unauthorised" is going to involve a percentage higher than 95. By that estimation the Spanish Telcos are about to find their networks suddenly and deathly quiet! However, Slashdotters have been pointing out that it is only "unauthorised" use that is banned and not P2P use in general.

The thing is, a complete ban on P2P networks is not so easily dismissed, as the article goes on to say "the government is going after Internet service providers; it's a criminal offense[sic] for ISPs to facilitate unauthorized downloading." I'm going to be generous here and suggest that the reporter made an unintentional generalisation - after all, the only way for an ISP to prevent all unauthorised downloading is to block all traffic which would put them out of business. So let's say that it's facilitating unauthorised downloading through P2P that will become a criminal offence. But how can an ISP discriminate between authorised and unauthorised P2P traffic? The answer is that they can't not with any reliability and not without a vulnerability to exploitation, so the only option is to block all P2P traffic.

It's a fair guess that Spain could turn out to have the most draconian anti-file-sharing, pro-IP measures of any country to date. I have to admit, it's kind of exciting to watch the IP industry whipped governments of the world froth and flail over this, especially when their efforts are so ridiculously out of touch and so hopelessly late. It's like watching an enemy army form up exactly as predicted.

The only thing this legislation will do is force file-sharers into darknets, and what will the ISPs do then, ban encrypted traffic? The Spanish government has taken a fateful step into an arms race they can't possibly win. And it's a step that might prove the tipping point for a global shift in file-sharing technology, one that would make policing the Net for supposed IP crime a truly Sisyphean task - a punishment they truly deserve.
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Universal Licence [Jun. 29th, 2006|02:05 am]
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This is a fascinating (if short) editorial based on this article (both at the very badly designed typicallyspanish.com via /.) about proposed changes to Spain's legal recognition of Intellectual Property Delusions. The proposed law will demand a mandatory levy on blank media as in Canada and Finland - strangely including memory sticks, mobile phones and scanners but excluding hard drives - with the resulting revenue distributed to copyright holders. How this revenue will be distributed in this instance remains unclear.

There are arguments that this is an indiscriminate tactic to regain the supposed lost revenue of the content industries, when there are many uses of the taxed products that do not infringe copyright. For instance, this law would mean that people backing up their own data to DVD-R are paying copyright holders for nothing.

But, there is another way to look at this: if you have already paid the copyright holder then surely you have the right to use the copyright holder's work. This tax can be seen as a universal licence to copy and to distribute copyrighted content. This might be considered analogous to the proposed (and subsequently shot down), broadband tax in France that would have made it legal to share copyrighted material over P2P networks. The Spanish levy is a socialistic response to the problem of IP in a capitalistic environment where such property can be reproduced infinitely and distributed globally at virtually no cost and very little effort.

The most interesting thing in the editorial are the quoted statistics on Internet use in Spain. Telefonica, which is not only the largest corporation in Spain but the also the largest telephony company in the world, has estimated that 90% of the traffic on its network is Internet use, and that 80% of that Internet traffic is P2P. There's a claim that the average Spaniard now buys only one CD a year (and who can blame them if that one turns out to be Shakira?) and that DVD sales have dropped by almost 30% between 2004 and 2005 (though for the life of me I'm not sure what they are supposed to have bought in that period). It may seem, from first appearances, that the Spanish government is reacting to this new reality by offering a way for both the content industry and the consumer to get what they want without a litigation war.

However, as mentioned in the article neither broadband connections nor HDs are to be covered by this tax - very strange, I think you'll agree, seeing as HDs have far more storage capacity and DSL lines are far better for distribution than any of the other media mentioned... unless transmitting copyrighted material over a DSL line and storing it on a HD will continue to be treated as infringement. I have to wonder what this will mean for HD based media players?

Under these circumstances this new levy is essentially just fleecing consumers while knocking a few more nails into physical media's coffin by making it more expensive and less attractive. At the same time it continues to allow the content industries to victimise their own customers and keep their broken business model afloat for a few more years.

Ultimately this is nothing to get excited about, it's Germolene on a spinal injury. Taxing physical products can only push consumers away and encourage the concept of data divorced from any particular medium, and that can only encourage the use of P2P. It promises a market where the CDs and DVDs are merely the means of transporting purchased data from the point of sale to the customers networked media player, and from there it's only a small step to online-only distribution.

I very much doubt that the companies behind the new (and already far too expensive) Blu-Ray and HD-DVD media will be happy with this proposal. Out of the cradle, into the grave, as it were.
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Content: audio/x-stolen [May. 11th, 2006|04:55 pm]
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The UK's Music Business Forum - an English RIAA wannabe - has written to the big players in the British ISP market (NTL, BT, Tiscali, et al) indirectly threatening them with legal action if they do not block peer-to-peer traffic through their networks. The MBF's special magic-reasoning is that p2p is used to illegally distribute copyrighted music and therefore p2p must be illegal - just like roads are illegal because they're used by bank robbers to escape with the loot... right?

The MBFs chairman, John Kennedy, said that ISPs were "doing very well out of digital music", not at all sounding like someone who smells pie.

All that this demonstrates is the music industry's continued resistance to, and incompatibility with new technology. The data distribution landscape has altered radically over the last decade and the content industries have found themselves stranded and isolated in a sea of enabled consumers. Their answer is not to adapt or abandon their now dysfunctional business models but to punish their customers for the crime of living in the present, to force and frighten them, and those that supply them with enabling technologies, into living in the past. They cannot accept that the capitalistic industrial idyll, where the basic limitations of technology gave big business control of music, is gone forever. Reproducing music is now trivial, everyone reading this is sitting in front of a tool with the capacity to copy any piece of music infinitely and distribute it globally. No amount of lobbying, threats and name-calling can change the fact that we have moved on and these industrial Neanderthals have not. With the enemies they are making today no one will miss them when they finally and inevitably slip into well-deserved extinction.
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The Fallacy of Lost Sales [May. 4th, 2006|05:25 pm]
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The MPAA has released a study by LEK Consulting that almost doubles the estimated annual loses due to piracy, the figure reaching $6.1 billion globally:

"The previous estimates didn't include the impact of free Internet downloading, which is incorporated in the LEK report. Another surprise involves the fast expansion of online piracy by consumers compared to the losses stemming from professional bootleggers who sell DVDs. Last year, according to a person familiar with the matter, copies of movies downloaded or received from people who had downloaded them cost the studios $447 million in the U.S., whereas copies stemming from professional bootleggers cost the studios $335 million. An additional $529 million in losses came from consumers making copies of legitimate films they bought on DVD or VHS." - Wall Street Journal Online (via /.)


This is bunk. And ill-advised bunk at that. On the one hand these figures will be used to justify the introduction of restrictive and offensive legislation that will retard our technology and threaten our privacy and our freedom. On the other hand, this makes the MPAA look like a worthless organisation of dullards who, having set out to make people spend more money on movies, only succeeded in making them spend less.

It's bunk because there is no reasonable way to accurately estimate lost sales where file-sharing is concerned, it just isn't possible. It cannot be proven that someone who downloaded a movie via p2p, for example, would have otherwise purchased a legitimate copy or gone to a legitimate screening, at least no more than it can be proven that they would not have. It's like suggesting that people who use libraries would otherwise have spent hundreds, maybe even thousands of euros buying the books they borrowed. Lets take the imaginary case of a 15 year old kid who has downloaded $400 worth of new movies and music: would that kid's parents really have coughed up the $400 had he not been getting the data illegally? Do they honestly think that, were file-sharing to suddenly disappear, Americans would jump up and spend an extra $447 million on movies every year?

I love movies, my favourites include Blade Runner, Fight Club, Seven Samurai, Dersu Uzala, For A Few Dollars More, Runaway Train, etc. Want to know how much I personally spent on movies in the last year? About €70, mostly on cinema tickets for movies that weren't worth it. I can't remember the last time I rented a DVD, though I've watched one or two that friends or family rented. I bought two DVDs at a total price of about €20 - one of those was a Christmas gift and both had been on the shelves for more than a year. Why so little money? Why so few DVDs? Because the movies made today are shit! I consider most of the money I've spent on them to be wasted. And I have never illegally downloaded a movie, I've never even tried, not because I fear legal repercussion but because, frankly, I don't want the movies that are available, not even for free!

As far as I'm concerned making it illegal to download that material is about as useful as making it illegal to eat broken glass.

If the MPAA want to know why people are spending less on movies they need to stop chasing these 'lost sale' phantoms and start taking a hard look at the crap their members are peddling. Just because they thought it was worth their money doesn't mean we think it's worth ours.
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Legal p2p in France? [Feb. 8th, 2006|03:58 pm]
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This is interesting. It looks like France is leaning heavily toward legalised p2p networks. Not only that but, according to the write up at ArsTechnica, they are essentially suggesting that the sharing of copyrighted files is protected under French law. This has emerged in the case of a p2p user, referred to as "Antoine G", accused of downloading and sharing over a thousand audio files who's copyrights were held by his accuser, a French recording industry organisation, Société de Civile de Producteurs Phonographique. From the AT article:

The ruling from the district court is rather clear (PDF, in French): the defendant was making use of these files for private, personal use, and thus his use was legal. According to the court, French law permits citizens to make fair use of copyrighted materials so long as that usage is not collective, or for commercial gain.


At the moment France is still in the process of debating a possible "flat fee" for the use of p2p networks, legalising them by (one assumes) providing a source from which to reimburse copyright holders for resulting lost sales - a piracy tax by any other name but at around €5 per month per internet user it sounds like a solid move. Without fluency in French I have to trust the AT spin here, but it does sound like this new ruling would pre-empt that decision by making the current free p2p implementation perfectly legal. AT have linked this to the Canadian p2p legal argument of 2004 in which a judge likened non-profit p2p networks to libraries:

"I cannot see a real difference between a library that places a photocopy machine in a room full of copyrighted material and a computer user that places a personal copy on a shared directory linked to a P2P service."


This is the kind of thinking that could change the world. This is also the kind of thinking that will most likely be stamped out in short order. The problem is that there remains an entrenched music industry that could be killed off overnight by such decisions, with hundreds of thousands of peoples jobs at risk, from management, through physical media production, to high street store staff. These jobs could all become totally superfluous in the new order this trend suggests. And it's not just music we are discussing, in legalising music sharing it becomes very difficult to argue against the sharing of other copyrighted material. This is something that threatens movie producers, books publishers, newspapers and magazines, TV, cable and satellite content distributors, photographers, the list is endless and includes all the businesses who find themselves dangling anywhere below the actual creative sources. But I'm repeating myself.

As exciting as this all sounds, I really don't think any government is going to allow such valuable industries to be wiped out this quickly and quietly. So relax, it's a brave new world and there is much money to be made by those who are properly prepared, but we're not there yet.
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Remember when music used to come on coasters? [Jul. 25th, 2005|12:53 am]
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Know what the biggest weakness in the music industry is? Not the pirates or the peer-to-peer networks, they're just facilitators.

It's CDs. Yep, the one last physical product of the industry worth buying is the one thing that allows high quality copying without restriction. Audio CDs can be duplicated without limitation, a track can be ripped to high resolution MP3 in a matter of seconds. An album can go from a CD to being posted online in less than an hour and can then be reproduced endlessly with no embedded indication of its transition point, no definitive way to tell who has accomplished the format change (which is why the lawyers are going after those who end up with the files rather than the people who created them).

I like CDs because I'll never have to worry about changing machines, or platforms, or technology. I can take my MP3s anywhere, and if absolutely necessary I can go back to the physical media to rip them into a new format. And you know what? If a friend of mine likes an album I can physically copy it for him in no time at all. It will cost me just a few cent and will save him sixteen euro or more.

When one person buys a CD there is the opportunity for two or three or twelve or two-thousand people to receive the benefit from that one purchase. This cannot be said for the proprietary digital formats such as that used by iTunes which is so secure it can only be used on a handful of products (incidentally making it quite unenticing to anyone with any sense of value and the option to buy something more user-friendly). That's why iTunes sales make up such a small proportion of the music held on iPods today; those players are holding huge amalgamated collections made up from two or three people's entire CD collections, swapped and borrowed and copied and ripped for just that purpose. These days when a group of friends likes a new album they only have to buy one CD and copy it between them. If your best friend asked for a copy of one of your CDs would you tell them to go buy their own? Of course not!

That's what's killing the music industry, not deliberate piracy but common courtesy, community spirit, simple friendship.

I think you can already guess what needs to be done, how the industry can save itself. Just stop making CDs. Force everyone to switch to proprietary music formats fixed to specific player IDs with no easy path to any other system. Customers will switch because they have no choice, the average music lover will stop the copying and sharing because they will have lost the simplicity of the current methods. There will still be methods involving software patches, format translators and DRM strippers, but that will be for the geeks, not something the common user would dare try. Everyone else who wants a piece of music will have to purchase their own.

CDs and CD burning will still be around for indy bands to make use of, allowing them to distribute their work in the interests of self-promotion. But even that will die out as the technology falls into general disuse.

It will cost thousands, even tens of thousands of jobs, perhaps eventually hundreds of thousands world-wide. Remember we're not just talking about the stores and their employees, but also the distribution services, the delivery drivers, CD factories, packaging designers and printers, the factories that produce the jewel cases, the engineering services that build the pressing and casting machines, the construction companies who build and refurbish the factories, the renting services and landowners. An endless list of people who's livelihood depends upon those little plastic circles.

But that's okay because the music industry will be saved.

And it's going to happen anyway, one way or another.
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Peer Two Peer [Jun. 30th, 2005|01:24 am]
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"We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties." - MGM-v-Grokster

I still have my old Panasonic Cobra Top portable stereo (circa 1994) with the Dodgy Headphone SocketTM fitted as standard. It also has a button labelled 'Easy CD Rec'. You just pop in a pre-recorded CD and a blank cassette then press the magic button and it automagically copies the CD into glorious analogue stereo.

Is this machine now illegal in the US? Are Panasonic going to have to pay for all the CDs I copied as a skint student? The manual points out that "recording pre-recorded tapes or discs or other published or broadcast material may infringe copyright laws". Yeah right, what exactly did they think people were going to copy using that button?

I'll bet that no one is going to stop producing CD->Tape machines as a result of this ruling. The reason is that analogue tape recordings are now considered so inferior that the idea anyone would want to listen to music recorded on them is laughable, even with auto-reverse and track search.

Despite the lamentations of various copyfight bloggers my thinking is that there is no real intention in the industry to interrupt isolated 'physical duplication' of copyrighted material by individuals – a process whose very physicality (handing a CD to a friend to copy) is a limiting factor. The ruling is really intended to put a stop to ephemeral duplication (via the internet) where there is no such limiting factor. Unfortunately there was no way for the court to make the distinction between software utilising an existing information network and simple hardware forms that have existed for decades, at least not without suggesting that physical duplication is actually legal. Therefore, what we ended up with was a blanket ruling that just appears ludicrous to any rational and reasonably tech-literate individual.

So here's a thought: how about introducing a co-operative element into P2P networks, a sort of temporary reciprocal, non-transferable 'handoff' between just two users that allows closed-circuit access to certain files? The second user can then pass them on to a third user if they wish using second handoff. Unlike traditional P2P both parties have to act in full knowledge of each other in order to share a file rather than open access to all shared files via a search systems (even the knowledge of the files existence would only exist between the two communicating peers).

The same P2P ethos would still exist but with an added sub system of Email-like activity geared to provide secure, backgrounded, restartable transfer capability for very large files. Perhaps there could be an active data packet archive on peer computers where small, disassociated components of handoff files could be stored 'holographically' to facilitate fast transfer via a swarming method. The system authorised by the handoff could be granted access to these anonymous data packets without the instance-by-instance knowledge of, but the tacit endorsement by, hosting users. The point here is that there could be a total ban on unauthorised music and video file transfers (those not associated with a traceable domain) via the top-layer network while still allowing 'underground' movement that could continue to serve very practical purposes for the online promotion of creative material, albiet in a far more viral form. It would literally be a Two Peer network where files would be shared only within groups of trusted peers, one member at a time, just like physical CDs, or books, or DVDs, or comics, etc – creative media will still be 'unofficially promoted' while preventing outright, large-scale distribution of the material.
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