America Delayed 6-Strikes

Once the entertainment industry and all of the country’s largest broadband providers reach an agreement, millions of BitTorrent users in the United States will be monitored by the RIAA and MPAA. 

The agreement in question says that people caught sharing copyrighted files will get several notifications, and eventually be punished if they don’t stop infringing. Such measures were supposed to kick-start last July, but they had to wait, because the involved parties did not meet the deadline.

In the nearest future, the Center for Copyright Information will start hunting and tracking down copyright infringers, thanks to an agreement between the US entertainment industries and the broadband providers. The parties have negotiated a system designed to warn and eventually stop copyright violators. After 6 notifications, Internet service providers could take a series of repressive measures, including “chocking the Internet pipe” and temporary disconnections.

This plan was announced as “Copyright Alters” a year ago. The deadline passed, but the measures are still not implemented. The CCI said that the dates mentioned in the Memorandum of Understanding weren’t hard deadlines. Instead, they were supposed to keep the outfit on track to have the Copyright Alert System up as soon as possible. They also claimed that they weren’t going to launch until they were confident that the regime is consumer-friendly and could be implemented in a manner consistent with all their goals. The implementation is expected to start later this year.

The industry has already selected a 3rd-party company to monitor BitTorrent swarms, but doesn’t want to disclose the names. According to the agreement, the “technology partner” in question will be tested by another independent expert.

As for the ISPs, they have to implement a system able to keep track of all the sent notifications. Such database won’t be stored centrally in order to ensure the subscribers’ privacy. Verizon, for example, agreed that copyright violation is not right and through the suggested voluntary consumer-friendly system, the ISP believes it can educate its subscribers and offer them access to legitimate alternatives.

Verizon points out that this program can offer the best approach to the problem of unauthorized file-sharing while respecting the privacy and rights of the Internet users.

Anti-Piracy Outfit Calls to Arrest Half the World

The BSA has published another study which contains the usual statistical nightmares, specifically designed to frighten politicians into locking up more people.

The publication claims that 50% of Internet users are copyright infringers and have installed unlicensed software. The 9th annual Global Software Piracy Study has revealed a sharp increase in software piracy, particularly among emerging economies. The anti-piracy outfit said that in the United Kingdom over 25% programs users installed last year were unlicensed.

The survey involved 15,000 PC users from 33 countries across the globe, and 57% of them admitted to unlicensed software use, which is an increase of 42% from the year before. The outfit estimates that the global annual cost of software piracy is somewhere $63.4 billion.

However, the United Kingdom is still below the global average, with only 27% of PC users admitting they have got software illegally in 2011. As far as the anti-piracy outfit is concerned, that means that the industry lost around £1.2 billion. The BSA explained that the United Kingdom is in a double dip recession and believes that it is very important to protect the entertainment industry’s intellectual property and its contribution to the economy. However, the outfit didn’t seem to think that the recession could become the cause of piracy and that its products were now too expensive.

Moreover, the BSA ignored the fact that the more expensive the content is, the more likely it’s to be pirated. This is born out by the fact that piracy is more widespread in developing countries, because people there are broke. Instead, the BSA says that the penalties for piracy are not very strict. According to the results of its survey, over 3/4 of British users surveyed don’t think the risk of getting caught is an effective deterrent to piracy.

The anti-piracy outfit is now calling for a stronger damages legislation, which includes double damages, in order to stop the increase in unauthorized software use. As a result, general counsel at Federation Against Software Theft called for the government to introduce new legislation which could make it easier for the entertainment industry to lock up pirates.

Meanwhile, this problem has another side which the industry hasn’t worked out yet. In fact, if over 50% of the world are pirates, then democratically they are in the majority! The conclusions are up to you.

Google: Another massive data protection violation

A specialist in data protection from Germany has made Google reveal all of the informationthat Google have been collecting from millions of German’s while mapping their country with the use the of Google Street car.

Not only were the cars taking pictures and mapping the streets and surrounding areas but they were also scooping up information from unsecured wireless internet connections.
Google alleged that it was an error with the computer software used and that it included some developmental software unintentionally installed in the street car's computer programming.
The collected data included, Internet search history, Emails, images,passwords, website postings and more.

Following this information release, at least another 12 countries began questioning the legality of the way the information is secretly gathered, and the content of the information and the proposed use of it, and to date so far no regulating body in the USA has be able to see any of the data Google’s cars have collected from its public.

This breach of data protection and secret information collection has been reviewed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), who did issue Google with a $25,000 fine as Google hindered their investigation into this affair, although the FCC did not find any breach of American laws in the way the information was gathered.

There so far has been no statement issued from Google about this collection of personal information, or who at Google had knowledge of it, and what the intended use of the collected information was to be for, with Google stressing that any collected information was not for use with/for any Google service or product.