Hi all:

Owing to a long-standing family commitment, p2pnet won’t be published again until Tuesday, March 16.

Cheers!
Jon

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Take your royalty checks, SoundExchange begs Los Angeles Times
When John Boydston got an e-mail from SoundExchange saying he had several thousand dollars in unclaimed royalties, he did what most sensible people would do. He ignored it. To the rock musician from Atlanta, “money for nothing” meant a song by Dire Straits, not a stranger contacting him out of the blue promising to cut him big checks. But then he got the message again six months later. Curious, he called SoundExchange. “Sure enough, they had a sizable amount of money for me,” said Boydston, 51, whose band Daddy a Go Go includes his two teenage sons. “It was several thousand dollars. That’s not a ton of money. But for a guy who makes CDs in his basement, it was enough to finance my next album.” Boydston’s money came from royalties that SoundExchange has squirreled away on his behalf since 2001, when Congress created the nonprofit to collect royalties from digital music streams on Internet, satellite radio and cable television. So far, the group has distributed about $360 million to more than 45,000 artists and copyright holders. But at any given time, about 25% of the money SoundExchange gets from online music services such as Pandora, XM Radio and Last.fm can’t be distributed because the artists can’t be tracked down. Currently, that amounts to about $50 million. And with the rising popularity of Internet radio, the cash pile has been growing, said John Simson, SoundExchange’s executive director. The problem stems from what Simson calls “bad data.” [More like Bad SoundExchange. [For more on this farce, see SoundExchange: $256 MILLION undistributed dollars, and stay tuned  ... ]

China warns Google to comply with censorship laws BBC
China’s top internet official has warned that Google will “pay the consequences” if it continues to go against Chinese law. Google announced in January that it would no longer comply with China’s internet censorship laws. It warned that it may shut down google.cn because of censorship and a hacking attack on the portal. Minister of Industry and Information Technology Li Yizhong was speaking at China’s annual legislation session. “We need to preserve our nation’s interest, our people’s interest, we cannot be relaxed with any information that will cause harm to the stability of our society, to our system, and to the health of our under-age young people,” he said. “So, of course, what needs to be shut down will be shut down, what needs to be blocked will be blocked.”

Google “99.9 pct” sure to shut China search engine-FT Reuters
Talks with China over censorship have reached an apparent impasse and Google, the world’s largest search engine, is now “99.9 percent” certain to shut its Chinese search engine, the Financial Times said on Saturday. It said in a report on its website Google had drawn up detailed plans for closing its Chinese search engine. The newspaper cited a person familiar with the company’s thinking as saying that, while a decision could be made very soon, Google was likely to take some time to follow through with its plans. That would be in order to bring about an orderly closure as the company takes steps to protect local employees from retaliation by authorities, it said. China warned Google on Friday against flouting the country’s laws, as expectations grow for a resolution to a public battle over censorship and cyber-security.

Three inspectors sign off on net filter blacklist Computerworld
New Zealand’s opt-in internet content filter, which went live in February, runs the Swedish Netclean Whitebox content filter on a set of servers. Banned websites must be justified and signed-off by three “warranted inspectors of publications”. The blacklist has more than 7000 URLs of child sexual abuse material, according to 2009 government statistics. It has been in construction by the censorship unit since 2005 and is affiliated with Europe’s Cospol Internet Related Child Abusive Material Project. Website requests are filtered by Border Gateway Protocol against a blacklist held on a central server in the government Censorship Compliance Unit. The list is maintained by the Independent Reference Group which reviews banned URLs each month for false positive listings. The managing director of internet service provider Watchdog, Peter Mancer, said the filter model could be used in Australia and would cost ISPs, excluding Telstra and Optus, less than $1 per customer, per year. Watchdog and ISP, MaxNet, have officially signed-up to the filtering deployment. Mancer said Telstra and Optus would likely need to run the filters on their own dedicated servers due to the huge number of subscribers.

Three Strikes Rule: Sleeping for Seven Months Heesob’s IP Blog
Last month I requested the South Korean government to disclose information on the three strikes rule that came into effect on July 23, 2009. Surprisingly there was no single case in which the rule has been actually applied or considered to be applied. This is surprising because the government, backed by copyright industries, claimed, when it strongly supported the introduction of the rule, that wilful repeat infringers (called ‘heavy uploaders’) were about 1,000 and most of the illegal file sharing took place in around 150 ISPs (largely in web storage service providers). Due to the heavy uploaders and ISPs having a symbiotic relationship with them, the loss to the copyright industry was said to amount to approximately 2 trillion KRW (in 2007). Relying upon the overestimated number, the government proclaimed that the three strikes rule was of urgent necessity for saving the copyright industries that were going to wither away. According to Article 133bis of the Korean Copyright Act, the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST) may order ISPs to take a measure: (i) to suspend for a period shorter than 6 months a user account of a repeat infringer [1] (Para 2); or (ii) to shut down for a period shorter than 6 months a web site [2] that allows a file uploading and has been ordered by MCST at least three times to stop an illegal filing sharing (Para 4). These are key provisions of the Korean three strikes rule.

Buckinghamshire village in Street View fight against Google Telegraph
Residents of London Road – a cul-de-sac of 30 detached and semi-detached houses in Broughton, on the outskirts of Milton Keynes – decided to take a stand after the Google Street View service was launched last year. They prevented one of the company’s cars from driving down the street, claiming that the images from a camera mounted on its roof would effectively allow burglars to peer over their garden walls. And for much of yesterday it appeared that the small band of householders had won a famous victory. When the service – which stitches together photographs of public roads to provide a “virtual tour” of towns and villages – went live in the Broughton area, London Road was missing. Internet users who attempted to look at the street yesterday morning were greeted with a blank screen and a message that read: “This image is no longer available.” However, villagers’ joy soon turned to anger when 360-degree images of the cul-de-sac eventually appeared later in the evening, with Google blaming a “technical glitch” earlier in the day. It left residents bemoaning a perceived lack of accountability and public control in the mapping service, which now covers 95 per cent of the UK.

Haven’t found that software glitch, Toyota? Keep trying Los Angeles Times
There has been a lot of speculation recently that Toyota’s problems with sudden acceleration may be caused by a problem in the vehicles’ electronics systems. The “electronics” includes millions of lines of software running on the automobiles’ computers. As The Times reported on March 3, Toyota’s chief engineer testified to Congress that the company has done extensive testing on its cars’ electronics and believes they are not the cause of the sudden acceleration. Having owned a Toyota myself, I have always been a fan of what I perceived to be the automaker’s high standards for quality. I also happen to have more than three decades of experience designing, building and researching reliable computer systems, many of which are embedded inside other devices. Based on this experience, I find it very difficult to accept the statements from Toyota’s chief engineer. And the implications extend beyond Toyota, to all other companies that rely on software for their product safety. As anyone with experience in embedded systems will tell you, there are nasty software bugs that can be extremely difficult to reproduce in a laboratory test environment.

Effort to Widen U.S. Internet Access Sets Up Battle New York Times
The Federal Communications Commission is proposing an ambitious 10-year plan that will reimagine the nation’s media and technology priorities by establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network. The plan, which will be submitted to Congress on Tuesday, is likely to generate debate in Washington and a lobbying battle among the telecommunication giants, which over time may face new competition for customers. Already, the broadcast television industry is resisting a proposal to give back spectrum the government wants to use for future mobile service. The blueprint reflects the government’s view that broadband Internet is becoming the common medium of the United States, gradually displacing the telephone and broadcast television industries. It also signals a shift at the F.C.C., which under the administration of President George W. Bush gained more attention for policing indecency on the television airwaves than for promoting Internet access.

Hollywood supergraphic battle may be over KABC
A sign battle that landed a local businessman behind bars may soon be over. He has less than 24 hours to remove the giant ad wrapped around a building in the heart of Hollywood. The city of Los Angeles crackdown on the giant billboards known as supergraphics turned into a legal fight that ended in the arrest of Kayvan Setareh, a 49-year-old man from Pacific Palisades. Setareh agreed to take the ad down in a deal worked out on Monday, and to have it down by Wednesday morning. In exchange, his bail was reduced from $1 million to $100,000. “It doesn’t justify $1 million. It doesn’t even justify $100,000, but my client wanted to get out,” said Andrew Stein, Setareh’s attorney.

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March, 2010

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 13th, 2010 at 3:55 pm and is filed under P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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