Politics and Law

Twitter made its case this week that it's up to the task of being a player in geopolitical journalism.

The Iranian government, which is attempting to control the flow of information among protesters of the supposed results of that nation's presidential election, is having difficulty stopping citizens from using technology to report what's happening, express outrage, and get people out to opposition rallies.

Because the U.S. has no diplomatic relations with Iran, information gathered on the Web is crucial to its understanding of the post-election unrest that has led to mass protests and fatal clashes with police. Twitter, where users have been filtering relevant information with the hashtag #iranelection, has been a crucial hot spot for raw news.

Twitter even rescheduled some planned downtime in order to stay accessible for Iranian users in the midst of political upheaval at the request of the U.S. Department of State. The diplomacy agency is working with multiple social-networking and communication services to ensure that conversation and information channels stay active.

One technique being employed to get around the government's online blockades is the electronic equivalent of a detour, which involves using something known as a proxy server.

Normally, a Web browser makes a connection directly to a Web site's Internet address. But that address can be easily discovered and added to the government's blacklist. The trick is to redirect Web browsing through a proxy, which could be a permanent commercial service, or someone volunteering his or her computer temporarily.

Worried that the Iranian government might seek out and punish any Twitter users who were employing the microblogging site for potentially subversive purposes, Twitterers are encouraging others to change their stated country of origin. Certainly, the Iranian government knows how to use Twitter and how to find people in that country using the microblogging service as a way to spread news about the protests.

The easiest way the Iranian government could discover which tweets were from Iranians is to look at whose accounts are registered to people who identify themselves as being from that country. A new thread that spread quickly across Twitter urged people around the world to change those settings in order to make themselves appear to be in Tehran.
•  With Iran crisis, Twitter's youth is over
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•  Google, Facebook rush Iranian language support

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iPhone 3G S debuts

It doesn't offer quite the same leap that the iPhone 3G offered over the first model, but the latest Apple handset still is a compelling upgrade for some users.
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Most iPhone and iPod Touch users say they've had success in updating their devices with the new operating system, but a smattering have hit roadblocks.
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The day after the DTV transition

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Apple warns about unsupported players' iTunes integration

A support article appeared on Apple's site Tuesday warning about unsupported third-party digital-media players.
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Will new browsers really upgrade the Web?

The latest browsers sport many hot new features. But the avant-garde must reckon with inconsistent standards, lagging IE, and slow adoption.
•  Firefox 3.5 'Web upgrade' planned for end of June
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The search for unbiased judges in the high-profile Pirate Bay case in Sweden seems never-ending.

Finding legal authorities who are not connected to the people involved in the case is apparently difficult in a country that counts only 9 million inhabitants.

Shortly after the verdict was delivered in mid-April, sentencing the four defendants to jail for one year for having assisted in making 33 copyright-protected files available for distribution, Judge Tomas Norström was accused of having a conflict of interest.

The accusations were based on his membership in organizations such as the Swedish Copyright Association, which counts among its members: Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted. All three are lawyers who represented the plaintiffs during the Pirate Bay trial.

Conflict-of-interest accusations were filed by all the four defendants, together with their appeal of the verdict to the High Court of Justice.

Court President Fredrik Wersäll appointed Judge Ulrika Ihrfeldt to investigate the conflict of interest. But shortly afterward, Ihrfeldt revealed that she also had been a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and was removed from the case.

Wersäll then moved the conflict-of-interest investigation to another part of the court system not involved in the main appeal of the verdict.

Judge Anders Eka was appointed to lead the investigation. But the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter revealed this week that Eka is connected to the Stockholm Center for Commercial Law, a research center at Stockholm University, where lawyers Monique Wadsted and Peter Danowsky also are involved.

Eka told the Dagens Nyheter that he is not a personal friend of the plaintiffs' lawyers and that he has no background in copyright law. Still, he acknowledges that an investigation of him for potential bias could be possible.

Wersäll told the national news agency TT that the investigation of Norström's potential conflict of interest is a high priority and should be finished within a few weeks.

If Norström is found biased, the case will be sent back to the district court. Otherwise, the High Court of Justice will look at the main appeal of the verdict and possibly decide to hold a new trial.

A few days ago, four record companies involved in the case--Universal Music, EMI Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music--solicited the district court to order the defendants and their Internet provider to stop operating Thepiratebay.org, Swedish media reports.

The Web site has been essentially unaffected by the verdict. The four record companies have verified that the site is still helping distribute copyright-protected files and asks the district court to order its closure and impose a fine if it is not closed.

AMMAN, Jordan--Even by the extremes of the Middle East, Jordan is an unusual place.

Unlike its neighbors to the south and east, it enjoys no vast oil wealth. It shares the region's longest border with Israel, about 150 miles, and signed a peace treaty with its neighbor in 1994. Although the northern third of the country benefits from a Mediterranean climate, the rest is largely desert.

That leaves outsourcing and other businesses as one obvious bright spot, and Jordan is hoping to enlist computer technology and the Internet to fight an unemployment rate that probably hovers around 30 percent, thanks in part to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Palestinian refugees the country has taken in.

Embracing the Internet also means trying to reconcile its rollicking, unruly culture of free expression with a population that's about 92 percent Muslim and a society that's far from as strict as neighboring Saudi Arabia -- but nevertheless conservative enough to prompt most women to follow the dictates of the hijab by wearing head scarves.

Jordan has had flare-ups of offline and online censorship, including imprisoning a female member of Parliament (since pardoned by King Abdullah) and encouraging bloggers to self-censor. Reporters Without Borders says that even though a law providing for prison terms for press offenses was canceled, journalists remain under pressure.

Then there are the less expected obstacles, like a proposed tax earlier this year of about 1.5 cents per minute on wireless calls, with the proceeds going to the livestock industry to subsidize animal feed.

CNET News recently met with His Excellency Eng. Bassem Al Rousan, minister of information and communications technology of Jordan, in his offices in Amman, to talk about outsourcing, DVD piracy, Internet taxes, open source, and other topics.

---

Q: If a Jordanian company opens an office in Lebanon, it can't easily send Jordanian engineers to work there. And company in Lebanon can't easily send engineers here. Is there any interest in eliminating some of these legal barriers?
Al Rousan: In Jordan now the unemployment rate is about 12 percent... It is not difficult for technical jobs, marketing jobs. It's easy to come and work in Jordan.

I started working in the private sector in 1997. I saw very easy movement from Jordan to Egypt, Lebanon, Pakistan, the Gulf. Also Pakistanis coming to Jordan. It's easy because we consider those jobs vital for the development of businesses. The movement for skilled jobs is easy.

If Internet access is more expensive in Jordan than Europe in absolute terms, and far more expensive in relative terms, what's the best way to bring down the monthly cost? Does the government need to subsidize it, or encourage competition instead?
Al Rousan: To increase the penetration, there are some obstacles we have to overcome. One of those is the language and the content. Just last week we had a talk with Google about Jordan investing in Arabization for the content. (Editors' note: Al Rousan's aide said afterward that this involved sharing of knowledge and was not a financial investment.)

Another thing is the price of computers. We started in the government a new initiative, what we called a laptop for every university student. He can buy a laptop with no taxes on it. He can pay for this computer for four years, about 15 dollars a month.

When it comes to the Internet, we used to have a monopoly in the fixed network. Now we are working on this... Last week a company named Meta launched their services -- WiMax, based on Motorola. And the prices are OK now. Comparing the prices of 2007 and now, they're less than 50 percent of what they used to be. The government also reduced the sales tax on the Internet from 16 percent to 8 percent. I have a meeting with the minister of finance -- next week I will meet with him to try to get him to reduce it to zero. Also the tax on computers will be zero.

What we're doing is infrastructure, building a fiber-optic network that will reach all the schools. We will use it to provide Internet service to the villages. We will ask the ISP operator: Go to these schools and use it as a connection point that you can distribute to the houses in the village.

What's the status of 3G wireless, which has been delayed a few times?
Al Rousan: The regulatory body for telecommunications is conducting an auction for the spectrum, for 3G. Hopefully by the end of (April) they will finish this process and they will be able to distribute the spectrum for the operators. It could be new operators or existing operators using it.

We've also started talking to some techical companies, like Qualcomm, about a computer that costs less than $100, which connects to 3G wireless. You have a keyboard only and it connects to the television and you can be connected to the Internet. It's cloud computing -- subscribers can use it instead of having a sophisticated computer.

If I have my numbers right, Jordan's official goal is to have an Internet penetration rate of 50 percent by 2011. Are you on track?
Al Rousan: As of 2008, penetration of the internet is over 24 percent. Revenue in the sector is over $2 billion. The number of employees working in this sector is about 22,000.

I know you've attracted investment from companies like Microsoft, and as of 2005, at least, foreign direct investment was around $100 million. What's your plan to increase this?
Al Rousan: What we are doing actually is the cabinet agreed to have a new (free-trade zone) for the telecommunication and IT, which starts by next year. They're started to develop it. In Amman, we think that having such an area will be very attractive especially now if you're comparing Jordan to the other countries around us, in many aspects from manpower, education, security, the price of real estate, and so on. The other thing which is very important is that most of our engineers work outside Jordan in the Gulf area. Now our plan is to bring them back, and instead of sending them there, have business come to Jordan.

We are now focusing on more businesses like call centers, for instance, which will serve banks, insurance companies, in the whole area, in the Gulf.

Will these be in Arabic or English?
Al Rousan: Both. And in Spanish. One company has a section that serves the Spanish language.

One of the biggest advantages in Jordan is the accent. In English and Arabic, we have a neutral accent. Here, especially in the Gulf area, our accent is almost the same as their accent. The other area we focus on is technical support and maintenance, having a technical center here in Jordan that will support companies and products like Cisco, for instance. They have a tech center here that employs about 80 IT engineers supporting the Gulf area. And part of southern Europe.

I believe the U.S.-based Web site ArabTimes.com is blocked because of its political content. How do you reconcile this with a liberal approach to Internet regulation-- will sites like ArabTimes.com continue to be censored by the government?
Al Rousan: There is a new law for telecommunications and audio visual services. The two entities will be in one law. According to the law there will be no censoring of the Internet.

When will this take effect?
Al Rousan: It is already in the law that the Internet is not censored. I think most of the government knows they cannot block it. It's a waste of time and money. This is what our policy is, not to try to do this. The problem we are facing is to convince many of the families, many parents don't want the Internet because they're afraid for their children. They want to guide their children and to tell them what to do or not to do.

But tomorrow or the day after they will go to their friends or an Internet cafe. It's better to have it in the house. The family and the government, we cannot stop those things. We have to deal with it in a different way. If you're a family, you have to educate your children.

Now we have a political Web site where they write many things, much of it good, much of it bad, depending on rumors. Nothing solid. There is no law which will excuse them for publishing such things on the Web site. Should these journalists be prosecuted? There's a debate over whether the law should apply.

The Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation publish an annual index of economic freedom. The survey says Jordan doesn't have a higher rank because it's too difficult to start a business, too difficult to close a business, the size of the government is too large, and there are restrictions on foreign investments over 50 percent in many sectors. Is this a reasonable criticism?
Al Rousan: The government tries to do their best to make this easier. There's a Parliament -- how do you deal with a Parliament that imposes taxes on telecommunications to support animal feed? They want to impose a tax on telecommunications to support animal feed. We managed to stop that. I'm trying to make you understand that Jordan is still a new country, historically. We're still not that educated about business and what it can do. So it's not always easy to make things happen.

You mentioned that foreign investors can't own more than 50 percent of a company. Yes, they can. They can go through the Cabinet. Every month we approve some. According to the law it's 50 percent unless the Cabinet approves, and we do that. The government is in favor of making things easier but the Parliament -- there are two forces opposing one another.

I agree with you, to start a business it's difficult. But once you're in the system it's smooth.

And this will be easier with the free zones, less regulation in general?
Al Rousan: Exactly. This will be used for industry, shielded from bureaucracy.

In downtown Amman yesterday, I found pirated DVDs of movies such as the Watchmen on sale in storefronts for 1 Jordan dinar (about US$1.41). My relatives here in Jordan told me I overpaid and could have found them elsewhere for about half a dinar. What's the government's view on commercial sale of pirated videos?
Al Rousan: You can read in the newspaper there's a raid, that they've confiscated these products. We signed an agreement with Microsoft, signed an agreement with Oracle...

What about not software licensing inside government agencies, but enforcement of copyright laws in general?
Al Rousan: Not just in the government, but outside as well. Now we're trying to establish an IT industry here. This is very important for us also. The law is very strict on these things. One way or another you cannot stop people from importing these...

Are you talking about imports from Syria?
Al Rousan: Syria and other places. You can also download them over the Internet. But the government is very strict: we get hundreds of millions of aid every year from the United States.

Under Jordanian law, is there a difference between pirated software and pirated DVDs?
Al Rousan: No, it's the same. It protects both. It's like the drug trade. You can try to stop it, but you cannot do it. There's always a way to get around it.

Is Jordan planning to adopt open-source software in government agencies?
Al Rousan: It will cost you more, by the way. We are working in the hospital sector, using open source. I think that in the beginning, the cost will be higher. In the long run it could be better.

You have to develop software to interface with the open source, which will cost you more. A country like Jordan cannot afford such things.

Any last thoughts?
Al Rousan: I think here in Jordan, the seeds are here. It needs somebody who can use it to get to harvest. A company whose operations in an area are very expensive, they can come to Jordan and find everything they need. In jordan, we have more than 6,000 graduates a year in information technology. Jordan doesn't have natural resources, so we depend on people. Software is one of the things that can succeed in Jordan.

The copyright infringers responsible for leaking an incomplete version of the unreleased movie "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" will likely face harsh penalties thanks to strict U.S. intellectual property laws, but copyright enforcement is still woefully inadequate abroad, representatives of the entertainment industry told members of Congress Monday.

One week after the 20th Century Fox film was found on the Internet, the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs held a hearing in Los Angeles to hear from industry representatives about how to address piracy.

Committee Chair Howard Berman (D-Calif.) said he plans to introduce legislation shortly to bring more attention to intellectual property rights abroad.

The committee plans "to work more closely with other governments to provide the resources, training, legal guidance and tools which they need to alleviate the international piracy that is so devastating to American ingenuity and American jobs," Berman said.

Piracy cost the film industry $6.1 billion in 2005, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, while copyright infringement overall resulted in $18.3 billion in trade losses in 2007, according to the International Intellectual Property Alliance. Copyright infringement also costs the U.S. 750,000 jobs per year, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

"We just spent billions of dollars on a stimulus package to provide jobs to millions of unemployed Americans, and if we merely focused on curtailing piracy and counterfeiting we would preserve almost a million jobs," Berman said.

While the U.S. government has cracked down on domestic piracy through legislation like the PRO-IP Act, most other countries are far behind, entertainment executives told Berman.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has estimated that Canada has the highest level of online piracy in the world, Zach Horowitz, the president of Universal Music Group, pointed out in his prepared testimony. He asked the committee to question Canada about its legal deficiencies, such as the lack of authority Canadian customs officials have to seize counterfeit goods.

"Ask them to explain their reputation as a nation unfriendly to the policies at the heart of copyright--and the realities of the borderless digital marketplace," he said.

Many countries also need to enact stronger laws against illegal video recording, said Richard Cook, the chairman of Walt Disney Studios. More than 90 percent of the counterfeit versions of movies recently released to DVD can be traced back to illegal video recording, Cook said. As high-definition camcorders become more easily available and more affordable, he said he expects the problem to increase. Federal legislation in the U.S. had reduced illegal video recording domestically, but it remains a problem in countries such as Ukraine, the Philippines, Thailand, and Mexico.

"The increase in illegal activity in these countries has been dramatic, and there is an urgent need for action," Cook said.

He urged the committee to address this problem in future free trade agreements.

Berman noted in a prepared statement that China has chosen to enforce intellectual property rights selectively. NBC, for instance, successfully worked with Chinese authorities to remove virtually all illegal content from the 2008 Olympics. However, NBC Universal has tracked 250 million views of pirated content on approximately a half dozen Chinese video-sharing sites over the last 15 months.

NBC has been able to tamp down the illegal flow of copyrighted content in the United States as Hulu has grown to become the second most popular online video site in the U.S.

"Our experience has proven that technology can play a major role in addressing intellectual property theft if the people involved are willing to make the effort," Rick Cotton, NBC Universal's general counsel, told CNET News.

According to Horowitz's prepared testimony, getting the right people involved may mean more coordination with Internet service providers. A number of European countries are working with ISPs to prohibit the flow of stolen content.

"Their goal is to combat piracy in a way that is fair to rights holders and fair to consumers," Horowitz said. "We, too, can learn from and benefit from the ideas of our international trading partners."

The Software and Information Industry Association announced Tuesday it filed eight lawsuits against illegal software sellers on eBay, Amazon.com and iOffer.com.

The organization filed the suits on behalf of Adobe, charging eight individuals with knowingly selling software illegally, including Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Acrobat 8.0.

"In the current economic climate, when consumer confidence is already low, it is essential that consumers are able to purchase software online knowing that it is legal and will function properly," said Keith Kupferschmid, SIIA senior vice president of intellectual property policy and enforcement. "Illegal sellers tempt consumers with low prices, but the software often doesn't work and, of course, comes without the full range of customer support offered by manufacturers."

This is the first time the SIIA has filed suits against users on Amazon and iOffer, though it has brought charges against eBay users in the past and even considered suing eBay itself. The option of suing eBay is not off the table, Kupferschmid said in an interview.

"The problem is so bad it would be silly to not consider all available options, and that's one of them," he said. "eBay has been a little bit more cooperative, and we continue to try to work with them, but ultimately it comes down to 'Do we have a huge software piracy problem on eBay?' And the answer is yes."

The SIIA has been expanding its antipiracy program, and including the eight new suits announced Tuesday, has filed charges against 40 online software pirates this year. Many of those cases are still pending, but many of those that have been resolved have been very successful, Kupferschmid said. In some cases, defendants have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, and some civil suits have prompted the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against online software pirates.

"We applaud the SIIA in its efforts to combat software piracy. The distribution of counterfeit software on any online site is unacceptable," said Ryan Boyce, CEO of iOffer. "We hope that by assisting SIIA with promoting this initiative, anyone who buys counterfeit software by mistake will learn how to report illegal sellers."

DirecTV lost an important case on Tuesday. Programmers, security researchers, and anyone who believes in a limited government won.

In a 2-1 split decision, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals tossed out a default judgment against a pair of alleged DirecTV television pirates, saying an "unauthorized decryption device" law the company invoked against them does not apply. That law promises statutory damages of $100,000 per violation.

The two defendants, Hoa Huynh and Cody Oliver, may eventually be held liable for copyright infringement or lesser violations, of course. But now DirecTV will have to fight harder for it, and the legal risk to legitimate researchers has been reduced.

The reason this could be an important decision is because it strikes at the heart of DirecTV's dubious strategy of treating purchasers of smart-card programmers as if they were necessarily criminals themselves.

In a dragnet of cases filed over many years, DirecTV has been suing people who dared to buy smart-card programmers. Those can, it's true, be used to repair pirate access cards disabled by DirecTV countermeasures (this type of card is sometimes called an "unlooper").

They also have perfectly benign uses. ISO 7818 smart cards are simply cards with both memory and a set of simple circuits. Many European countries use these or similar systems for payment cards. New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., use "contactless" smart cards to store subway fares. Electronic voting, medical records and cryptographic key storage are other common uses.

Obviously, to use a smart card, you need to program it. Sites like HackersCatalog.com sell ISO 7818 smart-card readers and programmers for between $50 and $70.

So why is DirecTV hassling people who buy smart cards? Well, they managed to obtain the customer lists from vendors--including one named "White Viper"--and then apparently assumed that every customer must necessarily be a criminal. The company sent more than 170,000 demand letters (demanding a check for at least $3,500) and filed lawsuits against more than 25,000 people nationwide.

The tactics DirecTV used were disturbing. An affidavit prepared by former DirecTV investigator John Fisher says: "On one occasion, I learned from some other investigators that (DirecTV) was trying to obtain a settlement from a letter recipient who had bought a plastic pouch that could be used to carry a smart card programmer."

Another Fisher excerpt: "I had finally fully realized that the end user campaign was an elaborate extortion racket. The letters were full of lies or misrepresentations and we investigators were required to coerce people into paying money for stealing services when we had no proof whether they had done so or not."

This principle, that the mere act of buying a smart-card programmer should not be viewed as evidence of illicit activity, is an important one to uphold. Using DirecTV's logic, anyone who downloaded a debugger could be viewed as likely to have bypassed copy protection technology. Disassemblers and tools like "objdump" should be viewed with suspicion as well.

Now, I'm not arguing that we should be applauding blatant DirecTV piracy. Neither is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which entered this case on the side of the defendants. If DirecTV can prove that Huynh and Oliver were watching TV shows for free, they should pay reasonable damages. But they shouldn't face six-figure fines for merely buying a smart-card programmer.

P.S.: The case revolved around Section 605(e)(4) of the Federal Communications Act, which has been in place since at least 1988. It says:

Any person who manufactures, assembles, modifies, imports, exports, sells, or distributes any electronic, mechanical, or other device or equipment, knowing or having reason to know that the device or equipment is primarily of assistance in the unauthorized decryption of satellite cable programming, or direct-to-home satellite services, or is intended for any other activity prohibited by subsection (a) of this section, shall be fined not more than $500,000 for each violation, or imprisoned for not more than 5 years for each violation, or both. For purposes of all penalties and remedies established for violations of this paragraph, the prohibited activity established herein as it applies to each such device shall be deemed a separate violation.

DirecTV had argued that 605(e)(4) applied to someone who merely inserted a pirated access card into a receiver, therefore "assembling" it. That's what the 9th Circuit rejected.

P.P.S.: I note this particular decision didn't make its way onto DirecTV's "Anti-Fraud and Anti-Piracy Enforcement Actions" Web site.