Digital Media

Australian film and music studios have claimed a victory in their war against copyright offenses, with a Sydney man convicted for selling pirated content last week.

Yong Hong Lin, owner of a music and movie store in Eastwood, Sydney, was found guilty of 15 copyright offenses in Sydney's District Court last week, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) and Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) announced in a statement distributed Monday. Lin is scheduled to be sentenced on August 21.

The jury acquitted Lin of 16 of the 31 offenses he was initially charged with.

Police had raided Lin's facility on February 27, the copyright organizations said, finding more than 16,000 pirated music and movie discs offered for sale. Some were allegedly imported from China, and some burned locally.

AFACT and MIPI said the charges were the "first copyright matters to proceed on indictment and be heard before a jury" in Australia. "Mr Lin has been judged by 12 of his fellow Australians and they have found his conduct to be criminal; now he must accept the consequences," said MIPI investigations manager Dean Mitchell.

Neil Gane, AFACT director of operations, said pirates should be in "no doubt" that what he called their criminal actions would be thoroughly investigated, shut down by police, and judged in court.

The copyright duo said criminal penalties for copyright infringement were up to $60,500 and five years imprisonment per offense for individuals, and up to $302,500 for corporations.

Renai LeMai of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.

The refusal of the government in Victoria, Australia, to provide data for Google's bushfire map mashup limited its scope and highlighted glaring problems with Crown copyright provisions, the search giant's top Australian engineer said yesterday.

With over 1 million page views since Sunday, the Google Map overlay showing Victoria's bushfires has been invaluable for tracking the extent of the disaster.

Google Australia engineering director Alan Noble told the Broadband and Beyond conference in Melbourne yesterday that he became involved with the bushfire mapping effort after Google engineers woke in shock Sunday morning to read about the horrific fires unfolding east of Melbourne, which have claimed nearly 200 lives.

Noticing the Commonwealth Fire Authority (CFA) Web site was already struggling to keep up with demand for its online list of bushfire updates, Noble's team had the idea of overlaying the data onto Google Maps to produce a real-time map of the fires' locations, and intensities. The CFA, which manages fires on private lands and has therefore remained at the front line of the devastating fires, consented--and within four hours, the new map was live.

The search giant's search for data to plot fires on public lands--which are managed by the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment--produced an entirely different result. With no public feed of the fires' location and an explicit denial of permission to access its own internal data, the engineers were ultimately unable to plot that data on the map as well.

The culprit, according to Noble: legally established Crown copyright provisions, which assign copyright over all government-produced information to the government and prevent its use without explicit consent. Crown copyright is well established in Commonwealth law, but runs contrary to data protection provisions in countries like the US, where data produced by government agencies is held to be in the public domain.

Noble said the engineers' experience this week was an example of why Commonwealth data protection provisions must be relaxed to promote open access to publicly relevant information. "It's ironic that I can download detailed NASA satellite imagery (of Australia) more readily than I can get satellite imagery from the Australian government," he told the conference.

The bushfire situation wasn't the first time Google has crossed swords with Crown copyright. The company had similar problems recently when it asked the Commonwealth Department of Health and Aging for access to the data in the National Public Toilet Map, which it sought to offer as an overlay to Google Maps.

However, Google Loo was not to be: citing protection of the data under Crown copyright, the government refused to provide that information. Google's fight to open up government information sources follows on from earlier advice, in reviews like the Copyright Law Review Committee's 2005 inquiry, that government-produced data be made more freely available.

In a formal submission (PDF) to the Victorian Government last year, Google Australia argued that "there are considerable benefits that would flow to the Victorian Government and the wider Victorian community from the unfettered availability of publicly funded, non-confidential government information...By making public sector information available to all organizations on the same terms, there would be an equal playing field for the creation of innovative products."

Google's Alan Noble

(Credit: Google)

Many private enterprises have been similarly reluctant to provide information: the recently launched Google PowerMeter initiative, for example, is all about surfacing relevant usage information to drive smarter energy usage. "We've been very disappointed with the amount of information utilities generally provide to customers," Noble explained. "Where people can efficiently and easily monitor their power consumption, just having visibility into their usage is enough to cut power usage by as much as 15 per cent."

The need for open data has become even more pressing with the rise of geospatial mapping, Noble said. Google Maps has become an immensely popular way of representing geographically-linked data in everything from scientific endeavor to real estate. With the platform's application programming interfaces open to all developers, Noble said the company's goal is to let any developer add mapping capabilities to represent information in new ways.

Fully 60 per cent of the hits to Google Maps, he revealed, come through the APIs--indicating that they were from third-party sites. "When you open up all this information," Noble said, "it fuels innovation in ways we can't predict. APIs allow developers to build new products from existing components very, very quickly." Sites like Google Maps Mania track interesting uses of Google Maps to display specific data sets.

Noble sees the widespread availability of APIs as one of two critical engines for growth in online applications. The other, gadgets, "are doing for applications what RSS is doing for content," he said, by allowing Web sites to integrate fully-featured capabilities from other sites and create "third-party mashups" that combine best-of-breed functionality in new ways.

"We're seeing billions and billions of page views every week," he explained. "No one company could achieve that kind of scale. And the thing that makes this possible is the openness and innovation that open APIs and open data sets enable."

David Braue of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.

Google Australia engineers have created a Flash map to keep track of the deadly bushfires ravaging the southeastern part of the country and help reduce the traffic burden to the official sites coordinating emergency services.

The fires, which have reportedly claimed more than 100 lives, are being tracked in real-time with information provided by the State of Victoria's Country Fire Authority via an RSS feed. The numbers on the map markers indicate the number of fires at that location and the colors represent the current containment status of that site (green represents safe, yellow for controlled, orange for contained, and red going).

"We hope that it's of some use to people who may be affected, to emergency services personnel, and that it takes some load off other websites which are being inundated," the team wrote in a blog posting. "The map certainly makes the scale of this disaster immediately apparent."

The team says it is working to incorporate additional information into the map and also offers tips for Web site operators who want to embed the map on their sites.

Additionally, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has posted a Google-powered map on its site.

The blog Liako.Biz has posted an examination of how data portability allows for these maps to be created.

Australian telecommunications provider iiNet on Thursday was dragged into court as major film studios filed a case against the ISP for allegedly letting its users download pirated movies and television series.

According to the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, speaking on behalf of Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Disney Enterprises, and the Seven Network, thousands cases of pirated movies and television shows have passed through iiNet's network without iiNet doing anything about it.

AFACT Executive Director Adrianne Pecotic claimed that iiNet had ignored requests from the companies to discipline its customers for breaking copyright laws.

"We have provided in this instance, over a five-month period, the IP addresses of thousands of people who are iiNet customers who are using iiNet Internet access to infringe copyright. iiNet has several options within its power to prevent that. They have not done so," Pecotic told ZDNet Australia.

"This is not about iiNet policing its network. There's no suggestion that they have to police their network. What we're saying, and what the law says, is that when they know that copyright infringement is occurring, they have a legal obligation to prevent it," she continued.

Options the Internet service provider had, Pecotic said, were giving the customer notice, limiting download speeds, or suspending browsers or P2P protocols. She said 9 out of 10 people in the United States who were given notice did not pirate films again.

The companies want a court order forcing iiNet to prevent its customers from engaging in copyright infringement over its network. If the ruling goes their way, they will likely claim damages, but Pecotic would not name figures.

When asked if other ISPs were undertaking such measures when sent infringement notices, Pectotic made vague reference to unspecified agreements between ISPs and content providers in the U.S. and U.K. markets, saying only that she intended to focus on iiNet because it was the focus of the court case.

She would not say if any other ISP was also ignoring infringement notices, but when asked if there might be future court cases, she said, "We wouldn't rule out any future litigation, no."

On the choice of ISP, Pecotic said only that iiNet was the third-largest ISP in Australia, and as such, she didn't consider it to be small.

According to Pecotic, 50,000 people in Australia are employed in companies affected by the film industry, which all feel the brunt of pirating films and TV, and the faster broadband gets, the worse piracy gets.

The case will come back before the court on the December 17, and Pectotic considered that it would run for about 12 months.

iiNet did not reply to requests for comment in time for publication.

Suzanne Tindal of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.

A number of Telstra's major broadband rivals have said they have no immediate plans to follow the telecommunications company's lead and use the Twitter microblogging service to monitor service outages and contact customers about support plans, though a closer look shows Optus to be one of the only large carriers not using the tool.

Telstra launched the offering over the past several weeks, garnering a mixed response from Australian users of the service, but rivals Optus, iiNet and Internode said they weren't as keen to offer an official Twitter-based service.

iiNet did admit that it had already dabbled in the tool and had an unofficial Twitter account. But the Internet service provider didn't intend on extending the channel to offer Twitter support in an official capacity, according to a company representative.

"For now, we're interested in informally participating in the commodity-free, open-conversation platform that Twitter encourages," iiNet said.

Despite its unofficial nature, answers to iiNet customer queries have been posted on the Twitter stream since the first post, on September 30. In reply to one tweet on whether responses would be coming 24-7, the company said, "Not at this stage, no. For now, it's proof of concept, hurtling towards a greater destiny! We hope."

The iiNet account's opening follows that of competitor Internode, which existed despite the ISP's managing director, Simon Hackett, saying the company was happy with its current use of broadband information site Whirlpool to communicate with customers.

"We're quite open to the idea (of using Twitter), but to date, we're finding that being open and accountable on Whirlpool has served us well for many years and continues to do so," Hackett said.

He said many senior staffers, including himself, were active on Twitter. Recently, when Internode had an outage, Hackett made multiple posts on threads discussing the problems.

Internode's Twitter stream has been in operation since midway through last year. Optus, however, seems to be the odd one out, with no Twitter account, official or otherwise.

"At this point in time, we're not using Twitter. However, we are always looking at emerging technologies and tools to improve the way in which we communicate with our customers," an Optus representative said.

Suzanne Tindal of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.

Street View, the driver's-eye view on Google Maps, made its debut in the United States, but it's now available in Australia and Japan, too.

Sydney, Australia now can be explored with Google Maps' Street View, shown with blue lines where available. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Google)

The Street View service has raised privacy hackles in some quarters, but it's helped me navigate in areas I've never visited: What does the house I'm visiting look like? Or the street corner where I'm supposed to get off the bus? Or where exactly is that big-box retailer?

Google also is extending Street View to Europe, and in the process is gathering data that will let it create 3D models as well.

To alleviate privacy concerns, Google blurs faces in Street View.

Update 3:30 p.m. PDT: The Google Lat-Long blog said the Japan imagery covers Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, and other cities in Japan, while Australia gets Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, and others.

Extra bonus: There's also a Street View Easter egg that Google apparently tucked into the service--a photo of what appears to be a gaggle of Street-View-loving Googlers.