FILE SHARING NEWS ARCHIVE
“Canadian copyright law is actually much stronger than U.S. copyright law in many ways, some of which are worth quite a lot of money to the USA”, says Canadian copyright expert Howard Knopf.
“It is worth noting as well that, for most of the last century, most copyright royalties in Canada have been flowing to American corporate interests”, he says, going on:
“While stronger copyright laws may not always make for better public policy, they often result in significant royalty outflows to U.S. and other foreign interests.”
Earlier in his post, “The deadline for submissions on the U.S. “301? process has been extended until 5:00 PM on Thursday, February 18, 2010 due the Washington weather”, he points out, continuing >>>
… this is an important opportunity to make views known, since the usual suspects in the U.S. copyright based industries will be working through the usual Washington lawyer/lobbyists that have much influence in the USTR to draft a report that could once again falsely condemn Canada as a rogue nation and a piracy haven, when the truth of the matter is that:
- Canada already has much stronger copyright laws in many ways than the USA;
- These stronger laws result in significant dollar outflows that greatly favour U.S. interests with little or insufficient benefit for Canadians;
- There is no verified and reliable evidence of piracy or counterfeiting problems in Canada that are any worse than in other comparable countries. In fact, the largest and most accessible market in North American for pirated and counterfeit consumer products remains the streets of mid-town and lower Manhattan;
- The alleged deficiencies in Canada’s laws regarding file sharing have not been proven in any Canadian court and the music and film industries have taken no serious initiative to do so, despite having been given a green light to proceed by the Federal Court of Appeal in 2005. Instead, they lobby for US DMCA+ type laws. Indeed, much of the alleged copyright problem that the music industry complains about in Canada is a direct result of its own successful wish for a rich private copying levy, the result of which has included the effective legalization of music downloading in this country, according to comments by both the Copyright Board and the Federal Court. The music industry has proven only that it ought to be careful what it wishes for, not that there is any need to change Canadian law; and,
- The entertainment industry in Canada is doing quite well, even as things stand. As Michael Geist recently reported, “Nielsen Soundscan has just released the Canadian music sales figures for 2009. Notwithstanding the regular claims that the Canadian digital music market cannot develop without copyright reform, the Canadian market grew faster than the U.S. market for the fourth consecutive year.”
 Now the truth can be told.
Barbie, who’s looking pretty good considering she’s 50 years old, isn’t an airline stewardess. Or a rollerskater. Or a biker chick. Or any of those other things she’s portrayed as being.
Nope.
She’s a geek.
And to prove it, “we are pleased to announce that her 126th career will be Computer Engineer”, says Barbie Media. (Yep – she has her very own PR outfit.)
But this isn’t about ‘product’ — about finding another Mattel moneyspinner.
Barbie the Geek is merely a figurehead for something else, something much greater.
She’s “another wonderful way of introducing girls to engineering, a profession that includes computer engineers and many others all working together on the world’s most important challenges”, her puff piece has National Academy of Engineering spokesperson Randy Atkins declaring, adding:
“The National Academy of Engineering shares their passion for portraying engineering as a ‘cool’ and
creative career path, because that realization both opens doors for girls individually and is vital to tapping a rich diversity of ideas that will lead us all into the future.”
To ensure Barbie the Geek “accurately reflects this occupation, Barbie designers worked with the Society of Women Engineers and the National Academy of Engineering to ensure that accessories, clothing and packaging were realistic and representative of a real computer engineer”, says Mattel, going on:
“Looking geek chic, Computer Engineer Barbie wears a t-shirt featuring binary code and computer/keyboard icon along with a pair of black knit skinny pants.”
Black knit skinny pants, eh?
And, “Computer Engineer carries a Barbie smart phone, fashionable laptop case, flat watch and Bluetooth earpiece.”
Not only but also, “With stylish pink-frame glasses and a shiny laptop, she is ready to conquer the day’s tasks on the go or from her desk.”
ANNNNND, “For girls to further experience the reality of being a computer engineer, the doll also includes a special code to unlock exclusive online game content on Barbie.com.”
Wow!
Says Nora Lin, president of the Society of Women Engineers, “Girls who discover their futures through Barbie will learn that they – just like engineers – are free to explore infinite possibilities, and that their dreams can go as far as their imaginations take them.”
“As a computer engineer, Barbie will show girls that women can design products that have an important and positive impact on people’s everyday lives, such as inventing a technology to conserve home energy or programming a newborn monitoring device.”
So when your daughter begs you for Barbie the $13 Geek, remember! This isn’t a plastic doll. It’s a career path!
We’ve always suspected Miley Cyrus was an extraterrestrial.
Now it’s been confirmed.
She has three hands.
OK.
But how many other appendages does she have?
And where are they?
What do they do?
Some say the pic on the right is just an example of Photoshop trickery.
But we know better, don’t we?
This indisputable proof that she’s a Martian, of maybe a Venusian, was revealed a couple of years ago, but has been suppressed by Walt Disney agents.
(Cheers, Em  )
“The Polish website Moje Jabluszko ran an experiment that proves the poor reliability of the liquid contact indicators (original, in Polish) installed by Apple in the iPhone”, says an anonymous post on Slashdot.
“They performed three different tests to challenge the LCIs, which they recorded as a movie”, it says, going on >>>
They decided to mimic regular usage of the iPhone — meaning, you go outside where it could be cold or warm, then move inside in a building where temperature might be dramatically different, but still within covered conditions.
So, they placed the iPhone in its box for one hour outside at -11 C, then moved it inside at room temperature for 24 hours.
They repeated the experiment 3 times, and after the third cycle they could show that the LCI located in the audio jack plug started turning red!
This is a clear proof that LCIs are not reliable and could turn red while the iPhone has been used under the defined environmental requirements defined by Apple. Here, only the condensing water could have been in contact with the sensor.
“In other words, even moving in and out during regular winter time will make you iPhone LCI turn red!” adds Slashdot.
story.
“Lol, he’ll be delighted at getting a full page advert on p2pnet free of charge”, said Feddak yesterday in a Reader’s Write.
His observation came in a p2pnet story on a cockroach comment spammer.
But I doubt if the item will send people rushing to cockroach comment spammer Tomasz Michalowski’s piano pages in Poland.
As I said yesterday, I thought he was gone. But he came back — with more fake comment posts like the four below, which arrived a little earlier this morning >>>
baby grand piano
Thanks heaps for this!… if anyone else has anything, it would be much appreciated. Great website HOT Pianoforte Links
player grand piano…
Thanks heaps for this!… if anyone else has anything, it would be much appreciated. Great website HOT Pianoforte Links
new pianos
Thanks heaps for this!… if anyone else has anything, it would be much appreciated. Great website HOT Pianoforte Links
piano notes
Thanks heaps for this!… if anyone else has anything, it would be much appreciated. Great website HOT Pianoforte Links
The last time this happened I emailed Michalowski who promised to stop.
He did. For about 10 minutes.
I emailed him yesterday and once again, he replied —- this time with a helpful hint which let me know it’s up to me to me, not him.
Here’s the email >>>
Hi Jon
Block the comments in htaccess rule : “deny from 125.41.181.59?
thats all
WHOIS for grand-pianos.org >>>
Domain ID:D117593774-LROR
Domain Name:GRAND-PIANOS.ORG
Created On:02-Mar-2006 08:45:42 UTC
Last Updated On:20-Nov-2009 07:02:17 UTC
Expiration Date:02-Mar-2010 08:45:42 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:Directi Internet Solutions Pvt. Ltd. d/b/a PublicDomainRegistry.com
(R27-LROR)
Status:OK
Registrant ID:DI_10691213
Registrant Name:Tomasz Michalowski
Registrant Organization:Tomasz Michalowski
Registrant Street1:Tomasz Michalowski, Mysliwska 19/7, Kolobrzeg 78-100 PL
Registrant Street2:
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Kolobrzeg
Registrant State/Province:
Registrant Postal Code:78-100
Registrant Country:PL
Registrant Phone:+48.517618480
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:
125.41.181.59 resolves to >>>
ChinaUnicom Hostmaster
CH1302-AP
No.21,Jin-Rong Street
Beijing,100140
P.R.China
+86-10-66259940
+86-10-66259764
Someone else who’s had problems with Michalowski calls him Piano Douche.
Stay tuned.
“Millions of European Internet Explorer (IE) users will have the option to choose an alternative browser from 1 March, Microsoft has announced”, said an item in yesterday’s p2pnet world headlines, quoting a BBC story, and going on:
“It follows a legal agreement between Microsoft and Europe’s Competition Commission in December 2009.”
What it comes down to is: having force-fed Internet Explorer to consumers for so long, Microsoft itself is now being forced —-
—- to compete.
Starting around the beginning of March, users in Europe will be able to pick the browser they want.
Because now it doesn’t have a choice. It’s ‘allowing’ people to decide for themselves.
Says a Microsoft post >>>
In December, the European Commission and Microsoft arrived at a resolution of a number of long-standing competition law issues. Microsoft made a legally binding commitment that PC manufacturers and users will continue to be able to install any browser on Windows, to make any browser the default browser, and to turn access to Internet Explorer on or off. In addition, Microsoft agreed to use Windows Update to provide a browser choice screen to Windows users in Europe who are running Internet Explorer as their default browser. This browser choice screen will present a list of browsers, with links to learn more about them and install them. The design and operation of this choice screen was worked out in the course of extensive discussions with the Commission and is reflected in the commitment that Microsoft made. Users who get the choice screen will be free to choose any browser or stick with the browser they have, as they prefer.
Internal testing of the choice screen is underway now. We’ll begin a limited roll-out externally next week, and expect that a full scale roll-out will begin around March 1, a couple of weeks ahead of schedule. If you are an Internet Explorer user in Europe, here is what to expect.
Says Nick Gilbert in a comment to the MS post:
“Seriously, after reading a BBC article about this blog I had to spend a good ten minutes looking for the source.
“Seriously though, it’s a shame that this is not going to help much. It’s now mostly companies that use IE, and they’re often still on IE6. I’m interested to see the change in the European browser market though. I’m a little bit hopeful too; Internet Explorer is still the most difficult browser to develop for. Mainly due to lack of features rather than opaqueness now, but nonetheless a reason to support other browsers wherever possible.”
Mozilla patches critical Firefox bugs Computerworld
Mozilla on Wednesday patched five vulnerabilities, three of them critical, in older editions of Firefox and in the process extended the support life of Firefox 3.0 by at least one more month. The newest Mozilla browser, Firefox 3.6, already contains the patches. Firefox 3.5.8 and Firefox 3.0.18 address three critical flaws in the browsers’ Gecko rendering engines, the HTML parsers, and their implementations of Web Worker, an enhanced scripting functionality that lets site developers shift JavaScript computations to a background thread to reduce the performance hit on Firefox’s user interface. Hackers able to exploit any of the three critical bugs would be able to inject their own malware onto the machine, Mozilla noted in the accompanying advisories. “Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code,” read the advisory dedicated to the browser engine issue.
Judge puts off ruling on Google’s proposed digital book settlement Washington Post
Google confronted a barrage of criticism from opponents of its proposed digital book settlement Thursday as the Internet search giant tried to persuade a federal judge to approve a deal that would allow it to create the world’s largest online library. During a marathon hearing before U.S. District Judge Denny Chin, lawyers representing the Justice Department, children’s book authors, privacy advocates and business competitors said Google’s agreement with some authors and publishers should be rejected because it would violate copyright laws. The opponents also argued that the $125 million settlement — which would allow Google to scan and publish millions of out-of-print titles — could give the company an unfair edge over other online publishers in the nascent but exploding market for digital books.
SOCOM Fights Piracy On PSP IGN UK
Sony hopes today marks the beginning of the end of the rampant piracy seen on its PSP platform. SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo 3, released today, is Sony’s first test at discouraging pirates from downloading PSP software. Those who purchase SOCOM Fireteam Bravo 3 are now required to register the title through PlayStation Network before given access to online gameplay. UMD copies of the game will come with a voucher code that must be redeemed online, while digital copies will automatically register in the background. Those who buy a used copy of the UMD can purchase a PSN entitlement voucher for $20 to play online.
Microsoft offers web browser choice to IE users BBC
Millions of European Internet Explorer (IE) users will have the option to choose an alternative browser from 1 March, Microsoft has announced. It follows a legal agreement between Microsoft and Europe’s Competition Commission in December 2009. Microsoft committed to letting Windows PC users across Europe install the web browser of their choice, rather than having Microsoft IE as a default. Figures suggest that over half the world’s internet users have IE. Testing for the update is already underway in the UK, Belgium and France. The software update choice will arrive automatically for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 customers, according to a blog post by Dave Heiner, Microsoft’s vice president and deputy general counsel.
Cannabis farm found at Swedish primary school The Local (Sweden)
A water leak led on Thursday to the discovery of a small cannabis farm in a school in southern Sweden, local newspaper Blekinge Läns Tidning reports. The school had called in maintenance to investigate a suspected water leakage and once up in the attic of the primary school in Blekinge in southern Sweden, they uncovered plants linked together with heating lamps and lighting. In total police found 13 plants. The would-be cannabis farmer had not been altogether successful with the enterprise as only one of the plants showed any sign of life.
Broad New Hacking Attack Detected Wall Street Journal
Hackers in Europe and China successfully broke into computers at nearly 2,500 companies and government agencies over the last 18 months in a coordinated global attack that exposed vast amounts of personal and corporate secrets to theft, according to a computer-security company that discovered the breach. The damage from the latest cyberattack is still being assessed, and affected companies are still being notified. But data compiled by NetWitness, the closely held firm that discovered the breaches, showed that hackers gained access to a wide array of data at 2,411 companies, from credit-card transactions to intellectual property.
WordPress failure takes 10m blogs offline Telegraph
Some of the best known technology blogs on the web, including TechCrunch, GigaOM and the Technologizer, were offline for almost two hours yesterday because of an outage at WordPress.com, the blog hosting service. The technical problem took more than 10 million blogs offline for 110 minutes and cost them an estimated 5.5 million page views. Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic, which owns WordPress.com, said the outage was caused by a server problem.
Facebook, PayPal green-light payment partnership CNet News
Here’s another one of Facebook’s gradual moves into the e-commerce world: The company announced Thursday a “strategic relationship” with eBay-owned payment system PayPal to make its technology available for the purchase of self-service ads as well as the Facebook Credits currency. “We want to give the people who use Facebook, as well as advertisers and developers, a fast and trusted way to pay across our service,” Dan Levy, director of payment operations at Facebook, said in a release. “As our business has grown, offering local methods of payment has become increasingly important for advertisers who want to buy Facebook Ads. Teaming with PayPal, a global leader in online payments, makes this possible.”
The final brief (PDF) filed by the defendant Joel Tenenbaum in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v Tenenbaum seems to put the final nail in the coffin on the RIAA’s argument that ’statutory damages’ up to $150,000 can be awarded where the record company’s lost profit is in the neighborhood of 35 cents.
Not only do Tenenbaum’s lawyers accurately describe the applicable caselaw and scholarship, something neither the RIAA nor the Department of Justice did in their briefs, but they point out to the court that the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit — the appeals court controlling this matter — has itself ruled statutory damages awards are reviewable for due process considerations under the guidelines of State Farm v. Campbell and BMW v Gore.
The brief is consistent with the amicus curiae brief filed in the case last year by the Free Software Foundation.
Does Microsoft still want to buy Yahoo?
If it does, that’s cool with the US Department of Justice’s antitrust division.
When Steve and the Boyz said they wanted Yahoo, some people thought that might create a bit of a conflict, so the DoJ unit launched a probe.
And now it’s an advertising expert.
“The Antitrust Division obtained extensive information from Microsoft, Yahoo! and a wide range of market participants”, it says in a DoJ statement.
“Experience and expertise developed during our 2008 investigation of the proposed Google/Yahoo! search advertising agreement also informed our analysis.”
Microsoft and Mr Purple “have finally figured out a way to jointly go after you and your money, calling their 10 year deal an agreement that’ll, ‘improve the Web search experience for users and advertisers, and deliver sustained innovation to the industry’,” said p2pnet last summer, continuing:
“Microsoft will now power Yahoo search while Yahoo, ‘will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies ‘ premium search advertisers,’ say the two new buddies in a statement.”
Here’s the DoJ’s thinking >>>
“The search and paid search advertising industry is characterized by an unusual relationship between scale and competitive performance. The transaction will enhance Microsoft’s competitive performance because it will have access to a larger set of queries, which should accelerate the automated learning of Microsoft’s search and paid search algorithms and enhance Microsoft’s ability to serve more relevant search results and paid search listings, particularly with respect to rare or “tail” queries.
The increased queries received by the combined operation will further provide Microsoft with a much larger pool of data than it currently has or is likely to obtain without this transaction. This larger data pool may enable more effective testing and thus more rapid innovation of potential new search-related products, changes in the presentation of search results and paid search listings, other changes in the user interface, and changes in the search or paid search algorithms.
This enhanced performance, if realized, should exert correspondingly greater competitive pressure in the marketplace.
But the DoJ isn’t letting its guard down.
“Although this particular transaction is not likely to cause harm, the department will continue to be vigilant in our enforcement of the antitrust laws in the search and paid search advertising industry” it assures us.
“I’m thrilled to announce that Google has acquired reMail!” – gushes Gabor Cselle joyously on his blog Gabour Hits, going on:
“I will be joining Google in Mountain View as a Product Manager on the Gmail team.
“Gmail is where my obsession with email started as an engineering intern back in 2004, and I’m thrilled to be coming back to a place with so many familiar faces. reMail’s goal was reimagine mobile email, and I’m proud we have built a product that so many users find useful. Still, I feel like we’ve only seen the beginning of what’s possible. Google is the best place in the world to improve the status quo on how people communicate and share information. If you have what it takes to make these changes happen, I encourage you to reach out and come join me.”
Yay Google!
Cselle had developed a neat iPhone search app and, “You might be wondering what will happen with reMail’s product”, he says.
Indeed.
Well, “Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail’s iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Store”, he states.
In a comment post, “This is great news for you and Google”, says Mr, continuing, “See, Google is pretty hellbent on destroying the experience as much as possible on the iPhone and that is why they bought your company, so they can remove your app, and possibly incorporate it into the Droid phones.
“I loved reMail. Now I wish I had never bought it.”
Says Anonymous:
“This does seem a little odd. ‘I’m proud we have built a product that so many users find useful. [...] Google is the best place in the world to improve the status quo’ — And so the first step towards improving the status quo is to remove an already-written application which many users found useful? I’m not upset about this in the way Mr seems to be, but I’ve read this article three times and I keep thinking that I must have missed a paragraph somewhere. Something that would say what the problem is with letting the already-existing app just continue to be available to anyone who might be interested in trying it.
“(I don’t use email on my iPod touch, so it doesn’t make much difference to me. But the article does seem odd)”
And in another comment, “I agree with the others that think this is great for you and the Borg, I mean Google”, says DVR.
“But now that you have been assimilated into the collective, where does that leave all the little people that bought your app? Or rather, trusted in you?”
No need to stay tuned.
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