Internet & Media

Is AT&T violating DMCA by not booting 'repeat infringers'?

One of revelations that surfaced following last week's report that AT&T was helping the recording industry fight illegal file sharing was how differently Internet service providers interpret U.S. copyright law.

CNET News reported that AT&T has begun sending warning letters to customers accused of illegal file sharing by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) as part of a "trial program." The letters began going out two weeks ago.

What was obvious after the story received wide attention was how much confusion there is about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the law that is supposed to help ISPs, Web services, and copyright owners navigate online copyright issues.

AT&T and Comcast, which also acknowledged last week it has sent warning letters to customers accused of copyright infringement, appear to be issuing these letters even though the DMCA doesn't require such action, according to copyright attorneys. At the same time, some ISPs may not be protecting copyright owners to the degree called for by the DMCA, specifically when dealing with "repeat infringers."

What it boils down to is some ISPs appear to be picking and choosing which parts of the law to adhere to in order to serve two separate groups. Those broadband providers trying to walk the line between not completely angering customers and doing just enough to appease copyright owners may be pleasing no one.

Nowhere in the DMCA does the law call on ISPs to send warning notices to customers on behalf of copyright owners, said Fred von Lohmann, senior attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that advocates for the rights of Web users. Ben Sheffner agrees. He's a former copyright attorney for Fox and NBC Universal who acknowledges being "very sympathetic" to copyright owners.

The two lawyers typically oppose each other on copyright issues but they agree on that point. They say the DMCA provides different "safe harbors" for specific kinds of Web services. Video sites such as YouTube and Veoh are required to notify users who are accused of infringing by a copyright owner. ISPs, on the other hand, aren't obliged under the law to send notices, say Sheffner and von Lohmann.

AT&T didn't respond to questions about why it chose to send letters. The nation's largest ISP, however, has commented on the issue of service interruptions. To anyone who would listen last week, the company pledged never to shut off a customer's Internet access unless ordered by a judge.

This isn't exactly what the big recording companies want to hear. They said in December that they had planned to recruit ISPs into joining their antipiracy fight. The RIAA said no longer would it file lawsuits against individuals in an effort to discourage people from sharing songs illegally.

The music industry has instead lobbied broadband providers to adopt a "graduated response" to file sharing. This calls for ISPs to gradually increase pressure on repeat offenders. The RIAA would like it if ISPs eventually terminated service for chronic copyright violators but the group never said termination was an absolute requirement.

But here is what's interesting about that. The DMCA section 512(i) says a service provider must "implement a policy of terminating in appropriate circumstances the accounts of subscribers who are repeat infringers."

AT&T's read on this part of the DMCA, according to one of the company's executives, is that only the courts can determine whether someone is a "repeat infringer."

The "repeat infringer" provision applies to all service providers, YouTube as well as AT&T, said von Lohmann. But he also said that AT&T is correct to leave the determination of who violates the law up to judges and not entertainment executives.

He said if accusations made by music and film companies were the only proof needed to shut off someone's Internet access, then lawmakers would have specified that in the DMCA.

"People shouldn't lose their Internet access without due process," von Lohmann said.

April Fools: Google's sentient computer takes over

Google loves its April Fools' jokes, and this year a prank emerged in the form of CADIE--an artificial-intelligence research project with a cute panda avatar--taking over the search giant.

"We're pleased to announce that just moments ago, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on and began performing some initial functions," according to a CADIE description accompanying the faux announcement.

The site pointed to CADIE's YouTube channel and CADIE's blog.

Among CADIE's abilities: • Gmail Autopilot, which answers your e-mail for you.
• Chrome updated for use with red-and-blue 3D glasses (more

Q&A: HP plans reign of ink from the cloud

HP has radical plans for the future of consumer printing, promising an end to printer drivers and the introduction of devices that just don't care what you're printing from--Windows, Linux, iPhone, or your washing machine.

CNET News' sister site ZDNet UK talked to Antonio Rodriguez, the chief technology officer of HP's consumer-printing division, about the fundamental changes it wants to make to low-cost output.

Q: First, what do you define as consumer? Increasingly, we're finding enterprises buying "consumer" equipment.
Rodriguez: That's an interesting dynamic. For me, it's a question of who's buying it. If the people buying it use it, it's consumer. If it's being bought by people three stages away from the people who use it, it's enterprise.

What's the thinking behind what you're going to do?
Rodriguez: Twenty-five years ago when the inkjet was invented, it looked fantastic compared to the quality of screens and nothing else could touch it. Now, lots of people have caught up with inkjet technology, and screens are a lot better. It's an incredible technical process squirting a billion droplets onto a sheet of A4, but it's commonplace.

There's a move to authoring and editing digital content, so we want to focus on ways to do that which keep printing relevant. And we're excited that while people are used to thinking of printers in terms of feeds and speeds, they're forgetting that printers these days have networked computers built in. We're going to make a lot more use of that.

There's going to be a change in the way printers are named, too. Today, if you go to the store, there are more characters in the model number than there are letters in the alphabet. That's before you get into driver hell.

What does that mean in practice?
Rodriguez: You'll take your printer home from the store and plug it into your network. It'll register with our servers over the Internet, and you can link that registration with your various accounts.

We have ways to make that easy. When you print, you print to our servers and those send the output to the printer. Or you'll be on a Web service, tell it what and how to print.

It doesn't matter what you want to print from. It's a Web service, so you can print from your computer, or your iPhone, or whatever. If you're printing from Google Docs, for example, it really doesn't matter what you're using to access the Web service. It could easily be a post-PC device.

But you can print locally if you want?
Rodriguez: You will be able to use it locally, too: we support local discovery via Multicast DNS.

Are people going to be comfortable with this change to Web-based printing?
Rodriguez: The way that I see it, we have to deliver on a set of core printing experiences. People print as keepsakes, photos, collage, on-demand printing. They want to keep a memento. We know that's a base human need.

Where will it take place? Ten years ago, it was all desktop clients--Adobe, Office, etc. Now the data collecting is taking place on social networks. What we've done is gone to people like MySpace and said: "We will provide a set of Web services that lets you expose more complex products," so users can select photographs and have them delivered as collages, or formatted as cubes you can cut out of the paper. Then there's utility printing--a map or a recipe is going to be more useful on paper than on a laptop. And communication, printing out office documents for others to read.

We're looking at all three as digital workflows. That's going to be a critical part of the future of printing as we progress along rich digital veins.

Complaints of Internet-based crimes up 33 percent

Correction 2:19 p.m. PDT: An earlier version of this story and its headline significantly mischaracterized a key metric used in the IC3 report. The overall finding of the report was that complaints regarding Internet-related crimes rose 33 percent in 2008.

Complaints of Internet-related crimes soared 33 percent last year, countering two years of consecutive declines, according to a report released Monday by the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

The IC3 Web site received 275,284 complaints last year, up from 206,884 the previous year. The organization referred 72,940 of those 2008 complaints to federal, state, and more

Swedish antipiracy law stirs up political waters

File swappers in Sweden, land of the world's largest bittorrent sharing site, The Pirate Bay, are facing a tougher future.

The so-called IPRED law, scheduled to go into effect Wednesday, will in some instances require Internet service providers to reveal subscribers' Internet Protocol addresses to copyright holders--including the film, music, and game industries--that charge users with illegal file sharing.

The Swedish law stipulates that property rights holders can take their grievances to a court, which will examine the evidence, including the extent of the file sharing, and decide whether the IP address will be released. The copyright holder then more

Contrarian Google launches investment fund

As expected, Google launched Google Ventures on Monday, following other Silicon Valley firms with a division to invest in promising start-ups.

"This is Google's effort to take advantage of our resources to support innovation and encourage promising new technology companies," said Google Ventures managing partners Rich Miner and Bill Maris in a blog post announcing the effort. "By borrowing the best practices of top-tier, financially focused venture capital firms and bringing to bear Google's unique technical expertise and brand, we think we can find young companies with truly awesome potential and encourage their development into successful businesses."

So more

Twitter tweaks replies, hires ex-Google designer

It didn't take long for Douglas Bowman, Google's former visual design leader, to land a new gig. Creative Capital's Spencer Ante reports that Bowman is taking the helm as creative director for Twitter, a spot that, up to now, was being held down by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

Bowman had originally stated that he had something else lined up prior to leaving Google, and it appears that this was it. Neither Bowman's personal blog nor Twitter's has made mention of the hire.

So what does this mean for Bowman, more

Murdoch biographer: News Corp. should buy Twitter

"There may not be anything less than Twitter that can distract Wall Street from News Corp.'s stubborn and, at this point, unnatural newspaper fetish," Wolff wrote, "and, as well, convince it, for one last hurrah, that (CEO Rupert Murdoch) isn't...well, gone."

The catalyst for Wolff's recommendation was the recent hire of former AOL chief Jon Miller as head of News Corp.'s digital projects. Miller's venture capital experience would make him an ideal candidate to spearhead an aggressive M&A strategy, and there's no more buzzworthy company than Twitter these days. On the more

It's official: Disney offers short-form YouTube channels

Update 4:50 p.m. PDT: To include comment from entertainment industry source on YouTube's DRM issues.

Disney has agreed to post short-form video content on YouTube, a deal that might come as a bit of a disappointment to those who had hoped to watch full-length ESPN sporting events or episodes of ABC's "Gray's Anatomy" on YouTube.

But those people shouldn't lose heart. This could be the start of something bigger.

Disney announced on Monday that it would launch "multiple ad-supported channels featuring short-form content from ESPN and the Disney/ABC Television Group." Under the terms more

Internet advertising revenues rise in Q4

Internet advertising revenues reached a record $23 billion last year, rising modestly during the fourth quarter as the economy headed further south, according to an Interactive Advertising Bureau report released Monday.

During the fourth quarter, Internet advertising rose a modest 2.6 percent to $6.1 billion during the three-month period, according to the bureau.

"Though some categories in the fourth quarter slowed or even dipped, reflecting the current economic challenges, the overall performance is up, confirming interactive's ever-growing importance to the successful marketing mix," David Silverman, a partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers, said in a statement. PricewatershouseCoopers conducted the study more