MegaUpload Will Sue Universal Music Group

After Universal took a pop video created by MegaUpload off YouTube, the hosting service took a decision to sue the music group.

MegaUpload has started a campaign on Friday, caused by a Printz Board-produced track, created in collaboration with some famous recording musicians. For example, P Diddy, Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown, and The Game demonstrated their support to the hosting service, and it seems that the IFPI and RIAA don’t like that much. Once the video in question started to gain success through Twitter, YouTube blocked access to it at the request of Universal and IFPI.

Last week, MegaUpload’s founder required YouTube to bring the video back and not to allow Universal take action again. That’s where the controversy started heating up. MegaUpload CEO claimed that nothing in their song or the video belonged to Universal, since the company had signed agreements with all musicians endorsing MegaUpload. Meanwhile, all efforts to reach out to Universal Music Group and start a dialog about the DMCA abuse were treated with unfounded legal threats and demands for an apology.

Unfortunately, MegaUpload was attacked and labeled as a “notorious” service by such outfits as the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, representing music and movie industry. However, the cyberlocker’s record of closing accounts of repeat violators and taking offline copyrighted files proves that MegaUpload stands against piracy and cares about the copyright owners. But even when the company has always complied with legitimate takedown orders, it wasn’t enough for the entertainment industry: now it asks for more while advocating the new SOPA legislation.

Universal is said to currently be lobbying lawmakers for the law that would allow them to not just delete certain material from a site, but to take down whole sites from the web. After such demonstration of the abuse of power by the music label, MegaUpload is sure that this tool of web censorship shouldn’t be put into the hands of multinational corporations. The service also suggests that such companies abused their powers when they have taken a decision to filter their song campaign on YouTube. In order to show their own power, MegaUpload is going to bring back MegaBox, an app that is able to rival with iTunes, because 90% of the sales would go to the musicians.

Kazaa Developer Will Sue Internet Giants

Experienced file-sharers must be familiar with the history of Kazaa – the early peer-to-peer file-sharing application, as well as with its downfall because of copyright issues and its comeback efforts. It seems that today the tables have turned, and Kazaa developer Kevin Bermeister is currently the chairman of an important American company intending to sue online giants like Google and Amazon for patent violation in a case expected to be worth hundreds of millions.

6 years ago, Kevin Bermeister was sued by the entertainment industry as a Kazaa developer and reached a settlement of $150 million. Now he has turned his attention towards the developing technology to fight online piracy. Today Bermeister appears to be an important shareholder and non-executive chairman of a company called PersonalWeb. A couple weeks ago it has filed a number of separate cases in the US District Court against online giants like Google, YouTube, Amazon, and EMC.

The company claimed that those companies violated 8 PersonalWeb patents in their cloud computing products, which includes content addressable storage, as well as distributed search engine technologies. The company’s CEO explained that they protect their proprietary business apps and operations via a portfolio of patents the company owns, and are currently actively pursuing licensing and participation in the operation of companies using such patents.

PersonalWeb helped develop related technologies – for example, the Internet collaboration platform for students named StudyBods, thanks to using their patents. One more project, developed by Bermeister and his team, is called Global File Registry (GFR) and is meant to turn Internet service providers into cyberpolice to stop Internet piracy and child porno. The latter can identify millions of known pirated files, so once it is accomplished GFR would offer a legitimate version of the content, and a law enforcement message is sent for kids porno. Meanwhile, Bermeister, before launching Kazaa, was also known for the creation of video games distributor Ozisoft 30 years ago, the former Sega World theme park in Australia back in 1994, and for being an important investor in Skype.

His complaint claims that Google’s, YouTube’s, and others’ core services are violating the company’s patents around identifying, processing, distributing and controlling access to information on the Internet.

Stand-up Comedian Tackled Ownership Issue

Upon the completion of his show at the Beacon Theatre, Louis C.K. managed to sell his “Louis C.K. Live at the Beacon Theater” for $5 a copy, thus making a profit of $200.000. That’s how he addressed an old issue of ownership. Earlier, when you purchased a product, it became really yours – you were free to share it, borrow or do whatever else you wanted. However, with today’s restrictions and DRM, such liberty has gone forever.

Louis claimed that his experiment appeared successful: within 12 hours after the show went on sale, he had more that 50,000 purchases, thus earning $250,000, which would break even on the cost of production and site. Soon he has sold more than 110,000 copies for a total of $500,000, which after deducting PayPal charges etc. left him about $200,000 of net income. Although that’s less than he would have been paid by any company to let it sell the show, they would have charged the consumers around $20 for the copy. Worse still, they would have sold an encrypted and regionally restricted copy and owned consumers’ private details for their own use. In other words, this way, consumers only pay $5 and are able to use the video any way they want.

The reason Louis decided to sell his show without his production company is because it keeps most of the profit. Moreover, it is reluctant to share it with giants like Apple or Google. As for his DRM-free product, he addressed pirates, saying that doesn’t really get the idea of “torrent” thing, but he did whatever he could to make it easier for others to watch and enjoy the show without any corporate restrictions. He asked pirates to consider that he wasn’t a corporation, but an individual who had to pay for the production with his own money, so it would be a right thing to refuse sharing this video but pay 5 little dollars to watch it.

The community’s feedback to his message was surprising – the consumers decided that his example could encourage other content creators to do the same and end up with more frequent releases at cheaper prices, which would worth this $5.

Louis has also conducted an interview to promote his idea, where he said that with the money obtained from this sell he is going to make a movie. However, in this case a comedian has an established large fan base, while the newcomer will need some help with promotion

US Senator Launched Petition Against Copyright Bills

An online petition started by Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is asking the Congress to stop the SOPA and the Protect IP Act.

The petition in question claims that the country has had enough of government’s meddling and over-regulation, but Congress is for some reason still pushing a couple of dangerous and unconstitutional legislations meant to regulate the sector of the US economy which is creating jobs: the Internet. This senator has already spoken against the suggested laws earlier, trying to explain the problems raised by them. In response, the entertainment industry insisted that both bills are necessary to fight piracy, which would increase the US income. At the same time, tech industries argue that the laws aren’t just going to affect their businesses, but also represent a threat to free speech.

However, Senator Paul wasn’t mentioned among the announced co-sponsors of the alternate piracy legislation expected to be released in a few days by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa and Senator Ron Wyden. This new bill would rely on the International Trade Commission to handle copyright claims and focus on payment processors and advertising networks, dispensing search providers and different online companies from having to take action.

In response, House’s chairman claimed they didn’t need a petition to kill a suggestion to prevent intellectual property theft on the Internet. Instead, they were waiting for a petition to stop “notorious” foreign sites stealing goods, profits and jobs that belong to US innovators. Aside from stealing entertaining content, such services also offer counterfeit medicine, automobile parts and even baby food. The government also pointed out that the introduced manager’s amendment considers legal and technical concerns with the original draft of the law. Meanwhile, the proposed changes reflect conversations with such web giants as Microsoft and Facebook, making it clear that the law particularly targets the worst-of-the-worst foreign notorious sites. Legitimate sites like Facebook or Twitter are assured to have nothing to worry about under the proposed legislation. The officials also claimed that the SOPA won’t provide a unilateral authority to the Justice Department or copyright holders to remove foreign sites.

New Tracking Service Will Reveal Your Downloads

There’s a new portal out there, Youhavedownloaded.com, which was designed to compile the biggest database of all the content downloaded through BitTorrent networks. It operates according to a basic principle: if you have ever visited this site, it would scan for your IP address and if you’ve downloaded any content on BitTorrent, it would reveal that.

Thus far, over 52 million users and 110,000 torrents, which consist of 2,000,000 individual files, became part of this service’s database. A sample of what Internet users have downloaded is indicated on their main page, like “Spy Kids 4” and show “The Walking Dead”.

The founder of the project, Suren Ter-Saakov, explained to cyber security researcher Brian Krebs that the portal had been launched as a proof-of-concept, which means that Youhavedownloaded.com stops short parsing through dynamic IPs. Despite the fact that the service neither stores nor collects personal identifiable details, Youhavedownloaded.com is still able to provide with a good scare for anyone.

When a user visited the service, he would see a message with his IP address, location and list of content that they’ve recently downloaded. Nevertheless, they can also see a removal request in the right corner of this page, saying that the service only aggregates publicly available data, and therefore doesn’t have to accommodate requests for removal. But since the founder wants to be nice, he offers a “Remove Me!” button over there. This is because Suren Ter-Saakov once received a “remove me!” e-mail from one user who has downloaded pornographic video and was afraid that his parents would know what kind of content he downloaded.

Meanwhile, cyber security researcher Brain Krebs admitted that the website in question only emphasizes an important but often overlooked fact – file-sharing networks became a very common and effortless way to spread malicious software. He reminds all Internet users that regardless of the content you want to download, you have to be always alert for virus attack. Bottom line is to be on the lookout for malicious software and make sure to have an anti-virus started at all times. In other words, everyone has to do their best to protect their own privacy and that of their personal computer. Although this has nothing to do with illegal downloading, it is still about downloading via BitTorrent.

Publishers Go Greedy With Apple

Six of the top publishers have cooperated in order to fix a price for ebooks higher than that of a hard copy – this is regardless of the fact that the cost of making an ebook is less than the cost of a hardback.

Wall Street Journal revealed that the price fixing was agreed on at the behest of Steve Jobs, who wanted to open an Amazon style ebook shop but didn’t want to involve discounting that made Amazon that successful. So, Jobs and six publishers have negotiated a new pricing model – they were undoubtedly happy since they felt that this move preserved the value of books and encouraged other businesses to enter the electronic book market.

This deal promises guaranteed profits on best-selling titles for such retailers as Barnes & Noble that today accounts for 27% of the digital books market, along with Amazon. All this offers tremendous profits for the publishers, but not many benefits for consumers.

This new pricing deal among publishers can prevent retailers from discounting electronic books without their permission, while there’s no similar agreement about printed books. Although the stores are still able to cut the price for printed books as much as they want to entice readers to purchase, they will now have to comply with the new, higher prices for e-books set by the copyright owners.

It looks like the publishers decided that people will now pay more money for the benefits of electronic books like portability and convenience. However, this might become the biggest own goal in the history of publishing. Currently the readers are forced to choose between the goods that are more expensive, they have to get mailed to them (but can be kept on shelves), and the goods which are instant but much cheaper. So, if the publishers force readers to pay higher prices for electronic books, they would abandon the idea in droves.

In addition, it’s unclear how copyright owners want to justify the margins in the scam. Currently, a typical book contract pays 3-10% of the final cost to the writer, while the distributor and retailer receive 50-60%, and the publisher gets the rest. While distribution of a printed book was quite expensive, since it required shipping and storage, an ebook costs a fraction of that. It may even be as low as 5% after the distributor takes a cost for delivering the product to the reader. However, the publishers didn’t increase the share of the authors who are still left with contracts. In other words, writers won’t see much money at all.

Data Transfer Record: 186 Gbps

Researchers have set a new 2-way network data transfer rate record of 186 Gbps in order to help work through tons of information spewing out of the Large Hadron Collider.

The researchers at Caltech, University of Michigan, and others have recently cooperated to push the limits of the amount of data that could be transferred in a wide area network. Today the computer experts acknowledge that very large quantities of data are able to be crammed down optical fibres and sent throughout the globe from continent to continent. The speeds in question are apparently equivalent to moving 2,000,000 Gb per day.

Now they expect that new networks could be constructed in order to use the technology in the next few years, most likely within the range of 40 to 100 Gbps. The 2-way connection, both ways reaching 88 Gbps to make up for a combined 186 Gpbs, sent information from ten Dell servers from British Columbia and Seattle through an optical network. This broke the earlier record, set by the same team, which was 119 Gbps two years ago. Moreover, the researchers decided to show the globe spanning potential of the high speed information network, and that’s why data was also sent to some institutes located in Brazil and Korea.

This network will be very helpful in work through the staggering amount of information derived from the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN facility, where the scientists are now trying to work through information that has indicated the presence of the Higgs boson.
Thus far, over 100 petabytes of data has been processed. This is really an outstanding amount of information, which could be compared to a Blockbusters-beating 100,000,000 Blu-ray disks. Meanwhile, the researchers believe that it’s only the start, because experts of the Large Hadron Collider will smash even more particles together.

At the moment, it is expected that the experts in laboratories all over the globe will be able to get their hands on information in order to solve mysteries of the universe rather than having to watch a download bar run as swiftly as an MP3 on a slow dial-up connection. Everything becomes easy our days, and petascale particle physics information can now be transferred to any corner of the world in merely a couple of hours.