Plagiarism Today points us in the bold new direction the entertainment industry will be heading in the future. More specifically, a bold new direction the entertainment industry’s lawyers will be headed.

[A]t a charity luncheon for the Entertainment Law Initiative, which was raising money for the Grammy Foundation, there was a thunderous applause from the audience, mostly comprised of attorneys, over a paper regarding Android applications the promote piracy wondering why no lawsuits had been filed against Google for secondary liability. Though most of the other papers admitted only received scattered applause, that one seemed to whip the crowd into a frenzy, indicating the possibility that industry lawyers are considering such a tactic in the near future.

It’s not an entirely new direction. Google is still the entertainment industry’s favorite punching bag. But, hey, billable hours! New billable hours! Surely that’s reason for a standing ovation! And a platform switch! Exciting!

A few more details emerged at the Wall Street Journal:

[T]he room went nuts during videotaped remarks by Ryanne E. Perio, a student at Columbia Law School, who wrote about Android smartphone apps that facilitate piracy.

During remarks describing her paper, Perio wondered aloud why offering those apps hadn’t generated lawsuits against Android parent Google, for “secondary copyright infringement” – i.e. facilitating piracy.

There seems to be no link to Perio’s actual paper, entitled “Policing The Android Market: Why The Expanding DMCA May Harbor Google From Liability For Illegal File-Sharing Apps Available On Android,” so it’s unclear whether Perio is referencing the official Android app store or simply broadbrushing (+4 troll points) Google as co-conspirators on any piece of software compatible with the Android platform.

If it’s the App Store angle, it’s a bit like claiming Walmart is responsible for secondary infringement because they sell copies of Nero (not to mention computers, blank discs, cable modems and other tools of the pirate trade). If it’s just because it’s Google’s platform, then it’s about as meritous as suing Microsoft because Limewire Frostwire runs on Windows.

Of course, a lack of merit has never stopped a lawsuit. And it certainly has never stopped lawyers from racking up expensive hours constructing a variety of legal Spruce Gooses. Sadder still, it has never stopped a court from rendering a ridiculous decision in favor of the even more ridiculous plaintiffs.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

At my day job I deal with a fair amount of image data. We typically are shipping the data out on either hard drives, thumb drives, or via SFTP. On occasion we will some times burn it to a CD and/or a DVD. But until today all the data was either large sets (200-400GB) variety, or small, less than 1-2GB. However today’s shipment was 18GB. What to do? I didn’t have a spare USB thumb drive handy so I thought, ah I’ll just throw it on a couple of single layer DVDs. So my first order of business was to figure out how many. As it is with Linux/UNIX, there is pretty much already a tool for everything, if only you look hard enough 8-).

For this particular shipment all the image data was organized into a couple dozen folders, each weighing in a ~100-200MB. I quickly figured that 5 DVDs should be more than enough, but how to optimally fill each DVD? Luckily there’s a program called dirsplit which made this a breeze.

Solution

Again another tool I’ve never heard of, dirsplit is actually a Perl script that can analyze a directory and report the optimal way to burn it to a set of DVDs. Once it’s done analyzing a directory, it’ll report back a set of .list files, one per each DVDs worth of files. dirsplit is part of the package cdrkit which in addition to dirsplit, also includes the following programs:

• dirsplit: dirsplit utility
• genisoimage: Creates an image of an ISO9660 filesystem
• icedax: A utility for sampling/copying .wav files from digital audio CDs
• wodim: A command line CD/DVD recording program – (“write optical disk media”) – a cdrecord replacement

It can get a little confusing, but cdrkit, at least under Fedora & CentOS, is comprised of 4 individual RPMs, so we’re only going to be using dirsplit. I installed it like so:

1

yum install dirsplit

dirsplit’s basic usage:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17

% dirsplit [options] [advanced options] < directory >
 
 -H|--longhelp Show the long help message with more advanced options
 -n|--no-act   Only print the commands, no action (implies -v)
 -s|--size     NUMBER - Size of the medium (default: 4488M)
 -e|--expmode  NUMBER - directory exploration mode (recommended, see long help)
 -m|--move     Move files to target dirs (default: create mkisofs catalogs)
 -p|--prefix   STRING - first part of catalog/directory name (default: vol_)
 -h|--help     Show this option summary
 -v|--verbose  More verbosity
 
The complete help can be displayed with the --longhelp (-H) option.
The default mode is creating file catalogs useable with:
    mkisofs -D -r --joliet-long -graft-points -path-list CATALOG
 
Example:
dirsplit -m -s 700M -e2 random_data_to_backup/

Once installed, cd <image data directory>, and run the following command:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13

# -e takes a number (1-4). In our case we're using 2
 
#  2: like 1, but all files in directory are put together (as "atom") onto the
#     same medium. This does not apply to subdirectories, however.
 
# analyze current directory, i.e. the dot
 
% dirsplit -e2 .
Building file list, please wait...
Calculating, please wait...
....................
Calculated, using 5 volumes.
Wasted: 7827961 Byte (estimated, check mkisofs -print-size ...)

In addition to telling us how many DVDs we’ll require, it also tells you how much wasted space the backup will incur, and provides you with a .list file per DVD. For the above run dirsplit generated the following 5 .list files:

1
2
3
4
5

-rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 1679528 Feb 18 21:18 vol_1.list
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 1689556 Feb 18 21:18 vol_2.list
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 1694680 Feb 18 21:18 vol_3.list
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 1694300 Feb 18 21:18 vol_4.list
-rwxrwSr-x 1 root root   17110 Feb 18 21:18 vol_5.list

The beauty of dirsplit is that the .list files can be utilized by mkisofs to generate .iso files, one for each .list file. The command mkisofs has an option, path-list which takes the .list file as an argument. I used the following command to generate a single .iso for the 1st .list file, vol_1.list.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21

% mkisofs -o ~/backup1.iso -D -r --joliet-long -V "BACKUP DISC1" -graft-points -path-list vol_1.list
INFO:   UTF-8 character encoding detected by locale settings.
        Assuming UTF-8 encoded filenames on source filesystem,
        use -input-charset to override.
  0.22% done, estimate finish Sat Feb 18 04:41:56 2012
  0.44% done, estimate finish Sat Feb 18 04:41:57 2012
  0.65% done, estimate finish Sat Feb 18 04:41:57 2012
  0.87% done, estimate finish Sat Feb 18 04:41:57 2012
  1.09% done, estimate finish Sat Feb 18 04:40:25 2012
  1.31% done, estimate finish Sat Feb 18 04:40:41 2012
  ...
  ...
  99.46% done, estimate finish Sat Feb 18 04:41:58 2012
  99.68% done, estimate finish Sat Feb 18 04:41:57 2012
  99.90% done, estimate finish Sat Feb 18 04:41:57 2012
Total translation table size: 0
Total rockridge attributes bytes: 1086116
Total directory bytes: 2136064
Path table size(bytes): 4858
Max brk space used bfe000
2292383 extents written (4477 MB)

You could use something more advanced to generate all the .iso files:

1
2
3
4
5

#!/bin/bash
 
for i in `seq 1 5`; do
  mkisofs -o ~/backup${i}.iso -D -r --joliet-long -V "BACKUP DISC${i}" -graft-points -path-list vol_${i}.list
done

Once you’ve got .iso files, you can use your favorite burning software to write them to DVDs. I usually just do something like this:

1
2

# in dir. where the .iso are
% sudo growisofs -Z /dev/dvd=backup1.iso

References

links

• cdrkit – portable command-line CD/DVD recorder software
• Splits directory into multiple with equal size for ISO burning purpose – cyberciti.biz

local copies

• Splits directory into multiple with equal size for ISO burning purpose – cyberciti.biz

NOTE: For further details regarding my one-liner blog posts, check out my one-liner style guide primer.

Netzpolitik.org points us to leaked internal minutes of a meeting of the European Commission the day before the massive Europe-wide demonstrations against ACTA. They reveal the EU’s top politicians taken aback by the scale of the planned demonstrations, but dismissing them with almost the same words as the IFPI (German original):

ultimately it will be hard to convince civil society organizations [about the benefits of ACTA]. Represented among them are interests that do not reflect the wider community. Specific activities were observed that do not always live up to the supposedly democratic intentions.

The minutes went on to detail some of the things people are up to:

ACTA’s opponents are trying to mobilize people against the agreement, in order to influence the remaining MS [Member States that have not yet signed] and EP [Parliament].

So the European Commission thinks that tens of thousands of people on the streets somehow don’t reflect the wider community — presumably unlike the small band of negotiators and lobbyists behind closed doors that drew up ACTA in secrecy for years, who do represent the European Union’s 500 million people.

And the Commissioners are just shocked that the opponents of ACTA, who have been denied any meaningful transparency about what was being agreed to in their name during those now-concluded negotiations, are desperately trying to make their voices heard by the only institutions left that can listen: the EU nations that haven’t signed ACTA, and the European Parliament that must still ratify it.

This suggests that the European Commission is completely out of touch with the people it supposedly serves, and still doesn’t understand the growing anger that its arrogant approach and condescending tone continues to generate on the streets.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

I’ve tried, goodness knows I’ve tried, but my designs end up suffering, looking boxy, bland and uninspiring.

Not that I’m that great of a designer but I feel the same way. I have to start in Photoshop to get anything decent looking. I try to get out it as soon as possible, but once I’m into the HTML/CSS my brain is in a more analytical and less creative mode.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

I can’t design in the browser is a post from CSS-Tricks

There are many hosting providers who maintain a “no questions asked” policy with respect to their clients and use this approach and lax, evasive or non-existent abuse handling infrastructure to effectively provide a safe-harbor for bad actors. That is not our business model.

Instead, we focus on hosting expression that has traditionally been subjected to frivolous legal threats based on its content. Our approach focuses on our team’s wealth of expertise in dealing with high tech abuse and legal issues and our willingness to zealously defend our clients from frivolous, manipulative, abusive or outright fraudulent litigation. Our experience and expertise in issues ranging from fair-use to libel and whistle-blowing protections means we can often gently (and sometimes firmly) remind third parties about the many protections afforded legitimate publishers in these areas.

Often a proactive, responsive and competent abuse management team engaging in an open dialogue and discussion with copyright holders or their legal counsel is all it takes to close what might otherwise escalate into a frivolous suit.

But dialogue isn’t always enough. Against this unfortunate possibility we have a second level of defense: In cooperation with our upstream providers in Switzerland we have some of the best free speech counsel in the world on retainer.

The folks behind the company, which is based in Switzerland, admit that they’re a bit more expensive than other hosting companies, but that’s to cover the cost of actually having people who will take the time to understand legal threats made against you.

Either way, the kind folks over at this new Righthaven are offering a 15% discount to Techdirt readers on everything except their bandwidth upgrades as a “thank you” for speaking out on various issues lately:

Remember us? The upstarts over at Righthaven.com? Providers of
“spineful” shared, virtual private server and dedicated server hosting
services from the copyright-sane environs of Switzerland?

We’ve enjoyed your coverage of SOPA, PIPA, ACTA (and us) and since we’re
launching this coming week, we’d like to give your readers the first
bite at the jellyfish (so to speak).

So for the next 14 days new accounts opened by Techdirt readers get 15%
off of everything except bandwidth upgrades. Readers who sign up for 3
or 6 months can lock that discount in for the duration.

Just browse on over to our order page at https://plutus.righthaven.com/
and type “dirtlaunch” when prompted for a promotion code.

Just our way of saying “Thank you” for increasing digital rights awareness.

We certainly cannot vouch for these guys, but we absolutely appreciate the need for more ISPs that have a spine in protecting their customers’ free speech rights. Hopefully more ISPs will realize that that’s a good selling point to potential customers.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

In the North Shore District Court this morning, Justice Nevin Dawson said that after a long time where officials could investigate the Dotcom’s potential access to funds – none of significance had been found. Justice Dawson said it was “highly unlikely” that he had other financial resources available to him that had not already been seized.

Prosecution acting for the United States Government had said that because Dotcom was “very wealthy” it was probably he had more bank accounts.

However, Justice Dawson said that put Dotcom in the position of having to “prove a negative” and that assertion was not enough to imply his flight risk.

Four new bank accounts were discovered in the Philippines, but they were empty, he said.

“The suspicion that Mr. Dotcom is very wealthy is not evidence of further assets and cannot be used against him.”

I’ve certainly noticed attempts by many to try Dotcom based on his outward appearance or the fact that he clearly was a show off who flung money around. And I can understand that desire. But, any trial should be based on the actual facts against him, not the fact that he was apparently tacky and a showoff when he spent money. If that, alone, was a crime, then tons of famous musicians, movie stars and athletes deserve the same treatment.

That said, the conditions of bail include no internet usage, which (as we’ve noted in the past) is pretty ridiculous, since nearly everything touches the internet these days, including popular phone systems. It seems perfectly reasonable to say that he can’t have anything to do with cyberlockers or Megaupload or such, but a complete internet ban seems extreme.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

But having looked closely at the offerings at CES, and comparing them to the mobile phone industry, I don’t believe that the entire concept of putting extensive intelligence into the TV is a wise one. The reason is mostly because of the temporal mismatch between the lifetime of a TV, and the lifetime of a mobile device, mobile OS, or mobile processor. You see, people want large screen TVs, and these are expensive investments. The main screen in most American homes runs around $1,100. And those screens are designed to have a half-life of around 60,000 hours of viewing. Now, it’s not clear how long the average consumer will keep a 1080p TV bought in 2012, but I’d suppose that 10 years is not a ridiculous guess, so humor me and work with 10 years.

So if there is one component of the Smart TV that costs $1,100 and lasts most people about 10 years, does it make sense to mate it to the “smart” part? The cost of the “smartness” is fairly easy to estimate: A Roku box, Google TV box, or Apple TV box run around $70-$100, a Boxee box goes for around $200. So, the “smart” factor runs between $70 and $200 street price. But what is the life-cycle of the average “smart” device? For that, I look to the phone market, where people cycle their smartphones every two years. Apple fans line up at the store to replace their one or two year old 3GS for a 4G because of added features and function. On Android and iOS alike, the latest OS versions, features and apps only work on the latest hardware. Does anyone here have an old phone or smartphone sitting in a drawer? Yes? Do you want to do the same with your $1,100 TV investment? It’s a given that a TV is not a smartphone, but for now we’re asking them to do similar tasks: apps, streaming media, social updates, etc. The Internet performance of the TVs will become out of date like smartphones do. Tying relatively cheap, 2-3 year life-cycle smarts to an expensive 10 year product just doesn’t make sense.

It seems the obvious solution is already here: keep the TV dumb, and provide a set-top box (STB) that has the smarts. The STB can thus be replaced cheaply, once out of date. Consumers can easily have more than one STB, not committing to any one company’s ecosystem. Do people really want to buy their TV’s by ecosystem? “Hey, I love this Sony’s picture, price, and size…but I want an iCloud, so I’ll buy this smaller TV instead.”

Really, the Smart TV is just a sales vehicle dreamt up and promoted by the TV OEMs. They had a bang-up decade updating everyone to flat panels, then pushing the upgrade to 1080P. They’ve had less success with 3D, and are looking for the hook to make another upgrade worthwhile. For now, Smart is it. But I doubt customers are eager to jump on, given they can just buy a STB. Even those actively looking for a TV may resist if there is a price premium, given most Blu-ray players and many cable or telco STBs already provide smart features. The TV OEMs are going to have to bundle in the smarts for free, and hope that they can make money back on the content ecosystem. But will they enjoy ecosystem lock-in for 10 years, or less?

So far, the Smart TVs sold to market are too new to have suffered from the life-cycle mismatch. The earliest Smart TVs can still compete on level ground with the latest, since it’s only been a year or so since they’ve been in shops. But it won’t be long until we start hearing complaints from those customers that “I can’t stream that resolution.” or “Why can’t I watch programs with that new MP4 codec?” or “That app doesn’t work for me. Why can’t I get the latest OS on my TV?” Some of those people will end up with a newer STB, and just obviate the smarts that had been built into their TV, much the same way most of us don’t use the TV tuner that is bundled with our sets.

Ultimately, whatever the problem that Steve Jobs “cracked”, or whatever smarts are provided by Sony, Google, LG, Samsung, etc. I think those smarts will be better placed in a STB (or tablet, or other smart device) than in a TV.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

• Older brains don’t remember stuff as well as younger brains because the pathways leading to the hippocampus degrade over time. Now we just need to figure out how to rejuvenate those connections — or grow completely new ones. [url]
• The “doorway effect” is a fairly common phenomenon in which you walk into another room and then realize you’ve forgotten why you’re there. The effect works in virtual environments as well as in real life, but don’t blame the doorway — it’s more likely that your brain is pre-programmed to purge your working memory after a triggering event. [url]
• Connecting our brains to computers could, if done right, extend our memories and computational abilities. Some predictions say it’ll happen in about 100 years, or maybe sometime in 2100. [url]
• To discover more interesting articles on the human mind, check out what’s currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

[Full disclosure: I work for one of the Globe's main competitors, but not in an editorial capacity.]

Dueck makes the bizarre claim that what should be a discussion about protecting children was “transformed” into a debate about privacy, as though there is no room to consider both. She then attempts to brush off all concerns about the bill, claiming it is akin to driving your car:

The car is your private property and you know how to use it, but some people keep making the road dangerous. You appreciate the radar gun or spot checks at the side of the road, and you take down a licence-plate number when a driver needs to be reported. It’s a public service that keeps us safe. That’s how police see access to your IP address – it will help them to identify lawbreakers.

The metaphor fits for why Bill C-30 is applauded by those on the front lines of child protection. Like using a radar gun, hackers employed by the police have developed software that catches images of child sexual exploitation. It’s illegal images that are being tracked. Police will take that digital evidence to ask who’s trading this, and that leads to an IP address – the licence plate of your car, if you will.

Unfortunately, Dueck has things backwards. C-30 is not about making IP addresses more accessible. Although the text of the bill does include them as one of the pieces of information that ISPs must hand over without a warrant, that is rarely, if ever, how online investigations proceed. Rather, police monitor networks to collect IP addresses that are exchanging child pornography, then investigate those addresses. In a way, IP addresses already do work like license plates (including the fact that they are not enough to positively identify an individual user/driver).

Currently, only a warrant can compel an ISP to hand over information, but they can also choose to cooperate with police. There are conflicting accounts as to how this plays out: supporters of the bill (including some police) claim that criminals are going uncaught thanks to the difficulty of obtaining warrants, while opponents, like Ontario’s Privacy Commissioner, claim that ISPs already comply with the vast majority of warrantless requests when child pornography is involved. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

Bill C-30 would force ISPs to hand over customer information without the warrant. Amusingly, Dueck’s car analogy could have been more appropriate if she used it correctly, since the police do not need a warrant to trace a license plate back to its owner. But even this misses the key point that vehicles are publicly licensed by the government, while ISPs are private companies offering a service to private citizens. It’s well-established that there is no right to drive anonymously, but C-30 legislates the end of anonymity online, and sets a disturbing precedent against the right to privacy when using any form of communication. Should the police be able to obtain customer information from printing shops without a warrant, just because some people distribute obscene or libelous flyers? That is a far more analogous question, and one that underlines the fundamental concept of privacy that C-30 violates.

We all want to prevent the exploitation of children, but the proposed methods for doing so would have unintended consequences, and that conversation can’t be hidden behind emotionally charged rhetoric. An urgent goal does not justify a reckless solution—nor a reckless column that confuses the facts. Dueck calls the conflict over C-30 a “sideshow” and hopes to “elevate the debate”, but in fact all she has done is join one of the existing sides—those who let the emotional resonance of child pornography override their sobriety, and believe that laudable motives excuse them from examining their methods or even understanding the details of the problem.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story