Threats to Internet Freedoms (consolidation thread)

[eyeno]

Anybody familiar with this group named Project Censored?

PIPA vote stalled while US censorship still grows
http://www.activistpost.com/2012/01/pip ... rship.html

[JackRiddler]

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/21/two_les ... /singleton

Saturday, Jan 21, 2012 10:58 AM UTC2012-01-21T10:58:00Zl, M j, Y g:i A T

Two lessons from the Megaupload seizure
Less than 24 hours after the SOPA victory, the Government seizes one of the world's largest websites with no trial

By Glenn Greenwald


Two events this week produced some serious cognitive dissonance. First, Congressional leaders sheepishly announced that they were withdrawing (at least for the time being) two bills heavily backed by the entertainment industry — the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House – in the wake of vocal online citizen protests (and, more significantly, coordinated opposition from the powerful Silicon Valley industry). Critics insisted that these bills were dangerous because they empowered the U.S. Government, based on mere accusations of piracy and copyright infringement, to shut down websites without any real due process. But just as the celebrations began over the saving of Internet Freedom, something else happened: the U.S. Justice Department not only indicted the owners of one of the world’s largest websites, the file-sharing site Megaupload, but also seized and shut down that site, and also seized or froze millions of dollars of its assets — all based on the unproved accusations, set forth in an indictment, that the site deliberately aided copyright infringement.

In other words, many SOPA opponents were confused and even shocked when they learned that the very power they feared the most in that bill — the power of the U.S. Government to seize and shut down websites based solely on accusations, with no trial — is a power the U.S. Government already possesses and, obviously, is willing and able to exercise even against the world’s largest sites (they have this power thanks to the the 2008 PRO-IP Act pushed by the same industry servants in Congress behind SOPA as well as by forfeiture laws used to seize the property of accused-but-not-convicted drug dealers). This all reminded me quite a bit of the shock and outrage that arose last month over the fact that Barack Obama signed into law a bill (the NDAA) vesting him with the power to military detain people without charges, even though, as I pointed out the very first time I wrote about that bill, indefinite detention is already a power the U.S. Government under both Bush and Obama has seized and routinely and aggressively exercises.

I’m not minimizing the importance of either fight: it’s true that SOPA (like the NDAA) would codify these radical powers further and even expand them beyond what the powers the Government already wields (see Julian Sanchez’ typically thorough analysis of that fact). But the defining power that had everyone so up in arms about SOPA — shutting down websites with no trial — is one that already exists in quite a robust form, as any thwarted visitors to Megaupload will discover. There are two points worth making about all of this:

(1) It’s wildly under-appreciated how unrestrained is the Government’s power to do what it wants, and how little effect these debates over various proposed laws have on that power. Contrary to how it was portrayed, the Obama administration’s threatened veto of the NDAA rested largely on the assertion that they did not need a law vesting them with indefinite detention powers because they already have full power to detain people without a trial: not because any actual law vested that power, but because the Bush and Obama DOJs both claimed the 2001 AUMF silently (“implicitly”) vested that power and courts have largely acquiesced to that claim. Thus, Obama argued in his NDAA veto threat that “the authorities codified in this section already exist” and therefore “the Administration does not believe codification is necessary,” and in his Signing Statement Obama similarly asserted that “the executive branch already has the authority to detain in military custody those members of al-Qa’ida who are captured in the course of hostilities authorized by the AUMF, and as Commander in Chief I have directed the military to do so where appropriate.” In other words: we don’t need any law expressly stating that we can imprison people without charges: we do it when we want without that law.

That’s more or less what happened with the SOPA fight. It’s true that website-seizures-without-trials are not quite as lawless as indefinite detentions, since there are actual statutes explicitly providing for this power. But it nonetheless sends a very clear message when citizens celebrate a rare victory in denying the Government a power it seeks — the power to shut down websites without a trial — only for the Government to turn around the very next day and shut down one of the world’s largest and best-known sites. The message is unmistakable: Congratulations, citizens, on your cute little “democracy” victory in denying us the power to shut down websites without a trial: we’re now going to shut down one of your most popular websites without a trial.

(2) The U.S. really is a society that simply no longer believes in due process: once the defining feature of American freedom that is now viewed with scorn as some sort of fringe, radical, academic doctrine. That is not hyperbole. Supporters of both political parties endorse, or at least tolerate, all manner of government punishment without so much as the pretense of a trial, based solely on government accusation: imprisonment for life, renditions to other countries, even assassinations of their fellow citizens. Simply uttering the word Terrorist, without proving it, is sufficient. And now here is Megaupload being completely destroyed — its website shuttered, its assets seized, ongoing business impossible — based solely on the unproven accusation of Piracy.

It’s true, as Sanchez observes, that “the owners of Megaupload don’t seem like particularly sympathetic characters,” but he also details that there are difficult and weighty issues that would have to be resolved to prove they engaged in criminal conduct. Megaupload obviously contains numerous infringing videos, but so does YouTube, yet both sites also entail numerous legal activities as well. As Sanchez put it: “most people, presumably, recognize that shutting down YouTube in order to disable access to those videos would not be worth the enormous cost to protected speech.” The Indictment is a classic one-side-of-the-story document; even the most mediocre lawyers can paint any picture they want when unchallenged. That’s why the government is not supposed to dole out punishments based on accusatory instruments, but only after those accusations are proved in an adversarial proceeding.

Whatever else is true, those issues should be decided upon a full trial in a court of law, not by government decree. Especially when it comes to Draconian government punishments — destroying businesses, shutting down websites, imprisoning people for life, assassinating them — what distinguishes a tyrannical society from a free one is whether the government is first required to prove guilt in a fair, adversarial proceeding. This is a precept Americans were once taught about why their country was superior, was reflexively understood, and enshrined as the core political principle: “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” It’s simply not a principle that is believed in any longer, and therefore is not remotely observed.



Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald.



Copyright © 2011 Salon.com. All rights reserved.

[Stephen Morgan]

https://torrentfreak.com/cyberlocker-ec ... on-120123/

In short, the majority of the major cyberlocker sites have disabled all filesharing, which is pretty much their raison d'etre, while several minor sites have shut down entirely.

[Stephen Morgan]

This bloke was using Mega to distribute his album:



Copyright, bitches!

[Allegro]

.
Not unlike others, the article below is an interpretation or condensed version of the Supreme Court's syllabus on international copyright relations.

_________________
Court allows re-copyright of public domain works
— January 18, 2012 3:08 PM

(CBS/AP) WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court upheld a law Wednesday giving U.S. copyright protection to paintings by Pablo Picasso, films of Alfred Hitchcock, music from Igor Stravinsky and millions of other works by foreign artists that had been freely available.

The justices said in a 6-2 decision Wednesday that Congress acted within its power when it extended protection to works that had been in the public domain. The law's challengers complained that community orchestras, academics and others who rely on works that are available for free have effectively been priced out of performing "Peter and the Wolf" and other pieces that had been mainstays of their repertoires.

The case concerned a 1994 law that was intended to bring the U.S. into compliance with an international treaty on intellectual property. Without it, American artists might have found it hard to protect their work in certain countries that lacked specific copyright arrangements with the United States.

The law requires people to ask permission or pay royalties before copying, playing or republishing foreign works that previously could not have been copyrighted in the United States.

"Neither congressional practice nor our decisions treat the public domain, in any and all cases, as untouchable by copyright legislation. The First Amendment likewise provides no exceptional solicitude for works in the public domain," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in her opinion for the court.

The court had ruled back in 2003 that Congress may extend the life of a copyright. Wednesday's decision was the first time it said that published works lacking a copyright could later be protected.

A year later, Congress adopted legislation to align with an international copyright treaty known as the Berne Convention, which is an agreement to provide a minimum level of copyright protection for all foreign works. Wired reported that the Convention included protecting property if is still copyrighted in its country of origin, prompting congress to re-protect foreign works that may have lost their copyright in the U.S.

But Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for himself and Justice Samuel Alito, said that an important purpose of a copyright is to encourage an author or artist to produce new work. "The statute before us, however, does not encourage anyone to produce a single new work. By definition, it bestows monetary rewards only on owners of old works," Breyer said.

According to Wired, a petition by a group of orchestra conductors, educators, performers, publishers and film archivists has been started, asking the court to reconsider their decision. They argue that by allowing works to be re-copyrighted from the public domain, it infringes on the free speech rights of people who had previously been using the works.

Justice Elena Kagan did not take part in the case because she worked on it while serving in the Justice Department.

The case is Golan v. Holder, 10-545.

[Allegro]

.
I think this article is an excellent reading for identifying how uses of classical and contemporary music scores can be managed via Internet. Highlights mine.

_________________
Free Trove of Music Scores on Web Hits Sensitive Copyright Note
— By DANIEL J. WAKIN, NYT | February 22, 2011

Humanity’s musical treasures — Beethoven piano sonatas, Schubert songs, Mozart symphonies and the like — come to life in performance. But they truly survive as black marks on a page, otherwise known as scores. Now a Web site founded five years ago by a conservatory student, then 19 years old, has made a vast expanse of this repertory available, free.

The site, the International Music Score Library Project, has trod in the footsteps of Google Books and Project Gutenberg and grown to be one of the largest sources of scores anywhere. It claims to have 85,000 scores, or parts for nearly 35,000 works, with several thousand being added every month. That is a worrisome pace for traditional music publishers, whose bread and butter comes from renting and selling scores in expensive editions backed by the latest scholarship. More than a business threat, the site has raised messy copyright issues and drawn the ire of established publishers.

The site (imslp.org) is an open-source repository that uses the Wikipedia template and philosophy, “a visual analogue of a normal library,” in the words of its founder, Edward W. Guo, the former conservatory student. Volunteers scan in scores or import them from other sources, like Beethoven House, the museum and research institute in Bonn, Germany. Other users oversee copyright issues and perform maintenance. Quality control — like catching missed pages — is also left to the public. “It’s completely crowd sourced,” Mr. Guo said.

The site has recently begun adding recordings. And through a partnership with a freelance musician in Indiana who runs a publishing business, it offers low-cost, on-demand printing of the music, often at a tiny fraction of the cost of standard editions. The prices of major publishing houses range widely depending on the number of instruments in the work or its length. A set of parts for a mainstream string quartet, for example, can run from $30 to $50.

The score library project has turned classical music into the latest wrestling mat for conventional information purveyors — newspapers, book publishers, record companies — and the new digital forces, like Apple, e-book sellers, music-sharing sites and Mr. Guo, now a 24-year-old Harvard law student.

While a boon to garret-living, financially struggling young musicians, the library has caught the attention of music publishers.

“I don’t know if I would call it a threat, but I do believe it hurts sales,” said Ed Matthew, a senior promotion manager at G. Schirmer in New York. “It is that profit that helps us to continue to bring out more composers’ work.”

Universal Edition, a music publisher based in Europe, where copyright laws tend to be stricter, threatened a cease-and-desist order against the site for copyright violations in October 2007. Mr. Guo said he did not have the time or money to remove all the offending scores, so he took the site down completely and posted an emotional farewell. That, he said, galvanized followers to appeal to Universal.

Then he took action. Mr. Guo said volunteers checked every score — 15,000 at the time — for copyright violations. He set up a company, Project Petrucci, to take ownership of the site to remove personal liability. (Ottaviano Petrucci was an Italian Renaissance printer who produced some of the first impressions of music with movable type.) A disclaimer was made to appear before any score opens, saying that the project provides no guarantee that the work is in the public domain and demanding that users obey copyright law. The site operates from servers in Canada, where copyright law is generally looser.

“We cannot know the copyright laws of 200 countries around the world,” Mr. Guo said. “It is up to the downloader.”

In July 2008 the project came back online. Downloads have surged.

Some complaints still arise, especially from Europe, Mr. Guo said. “We say we are not bound by E.U. law,” he added, referring to the European Union. “Publishers usually go away.” Mr. Guo said no formal legal challenges were pending.

He shows publishers little sympathy.

“In many cases these publishers are basically getting the revenue off of composers who are dead for a very long time,” Mr. Guo said. “The Internet has become the dominant form of communication. Copyright law needs to change with it. We want people to have access to this material to foster creativity. Personally I don’t feel pity for these publishers.”

Those who “cling to their old business model,” he added, will simply fade away.

But publishers point out that users of the site can miss the benefit of some modern editions that may be entitled to copyright protection — and thus not part of the public domain — because of significant changes to the music, such as corrections and editing marks based on years of scholarship about the composer’s intention.

“You’re paying for something that’s worth more than the paper you’re receiving,” said Jonathan Irons, Universal Edition’s promotion manager in Vienna. “Everybody expects somebody else to pay for it.”

Music publishers also suggest that the site’s warnings to avoid copyright violations amount to little more than a wink.

Mr. Irons said Universal was unfairly maligned by its critics for doing what music publishers typically do: use revenue from the sale of old pieces to finance publishing of contemporary composers. “They think we’re sitting on our bums raking in cash, eating cake,” he said.

But he made an effort to sound conciliatory about Mr. Guo’s project, saying several times in an interview that “there’s room for both of us.” At the same time, Mr. Irons said, it is important to separate “this very valiant and completely kosher and clean repository of public material, which we perfectly endorse, and this kind of firebrand ‘We want to show the publishers they’re wrong’ kind of attitude.”

One blogger on music and technology, Gregory Beaver, who is also the cellist of the Chiara String Quartet, said in an e-mail that the site “has the potential to democratize printed classical music much as open source has democratized the programming world.” But it could stand “a great deal of technical improvement in both its organization of the data and the look and feel.”

Many important composers — including Stravinsky, Bartok and Messiaen — are barely represented or absent because the copyright has not expired for their works. But a number of contemporary composers have agreed to allow their works to be scanned under a Creative Commons license, which permits free online sharing as long as the originator is properly credited.

At least one professional group uses the site prominently. The Borromeo String Quartet plays from laptops with downloaded scores instead of sheet music. The digital music library is one of its major sources.

Mr. Guo said his drive to create a grand repository of music stemmed from his childhood in China, where his parents, both engineers, sent him to study violin at the elementary school of the Shanghai Conservatory. Browsing through a bookstore one day, he said, he was frustrated by how few orchestral scores were available.

His father took him to Vancouver, British Columbia, for high school when he was 13. Mr. Guo graduated a year early and entered the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston to study composition. There a world of scores, at the library and in music shops, lay open to him. But the memory of musical deprivation remained strong, and the idea of a bank of digital scores took flight.

“It was sort of the winter, and there wasn’t much going on,” Mr. Guo said. “I just thought this would be something that was a nice fit for my skill set. I’m a bit of a computer geek and a music geek and a law geek. That’s how I got started.”

And so, over a month during the New England winter, he built an early version of the International Music Score Library Project. “It was pretty ugly,” he said. He uploaded the first score: Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 1. “It was sort of a symbolic thing,” he said. The scan is there, dated Feb. 16, 2006. The uploader is listed as Feldmahler, Mr. Guo’s online handle, a name based on wordplay involving the composers Morton Feldman and Gustav Mahler.

The copyright questions stoked Mr. Guo’s interest in the law. Thus Harvard Law School. But that was not the only reason he enrolled. “Composing is very good until you have to pay your bills,” he said.

With the reports of billion-dollar valuations floating around other interactive Web sites, has Mr. Guo ever thought of trying to profit from his site?

“That’s really not my M.O.,” he said. “As a musician I have a duty to promote music. That’s the basic philosophy behind it.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 23, 2011

An article on Tuesday about a Web site created to make many classical music scores available free to the public misstated part of the site’s name. It is the International Music Score Library Project, not the Internet Music Score Library Project.

A version of this article appeared in print on February 22, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition.

[eyeno]

Not sure about the credibility of the source but if true, yikes. And this does not strike me as the actions of a benevolent freedom fighting group.

Twitter users are being tricked into joining Anonymous cyber attacks on U.S. government - and could be jailed

Links turn any PC into an unwitting part of attack
Part of 'hacktivist' group Anonymous's cyber attacks
Retaliation for U.S. strike at file-sharing site


Last updated at 9:31 AM on 23rd January 2012

Comments (45)
Share



Anonymous

Links being forwarded via Twitter actually make people's PCs part of Anonymous's 'denial of service' attacks against U.S. government sites and anti-piracy organisations

Hacker group Anonymous have become a cult hit on Twitter, with 249,000 followers - but security experts Sophos warn that fans, are being tricked into taking part in its attacks.

Links being forwarded via Twitter actually make people's PCs part of Anonymous's 'denial of service' attacks against U.S. government sites and anti-piracy organisations.

The links are being forwarded as part of Anonymous's recent 'Operation Megaupload' - a retaliation for the U.S. government 'taking down' a file-sharing site.

They look like ordinary web links, but launch cyber attacks from whatever PC you access them on.

People who click the links unwittingly become part of Anonymous's attacks - and hit any website that the 'hacktivist' group chooses.

It's a change of tactics for Anonymous - and security experts warn that claiming you clicked on a link by accident may not be a defense.

The attacks, a 'denial of service' attack, rely on thousands of PCs sending information to sites at once to crash them

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... ailed.html

[Stephen Morgan]

Unlikely. I don't think even IE is that insecure.

Daily Mail, so could well be fiction. And Sophos, which isn't reassuring given that in the last few days they have been outed as setting up their software to give random false alarms to make people think their software is more valuable.

[Nordic]

.
I think this article is an excellent reading for identifying how uses of classical and contemporary music scores can be managed via Internet. Highlights mine.

_________________
Free Trove of Music Scores on Web Hits Sensitive Copyright Note
— By DANIEL J. WAKIN, NYT | February 22, 2011

Humanity’s musical treasures — Beethoven piano sonatas, Schubert songs, Mozart symphonies and the like — come to life in performance. But they truly survive as black marks on a page, otherwise known as scores. Now a Web site founded five years ago by a conservatory student, then 19 years old, has made a vast expanse of this repertory available, free.

The site, the International Music Score Library Project, has trod in the footsteps of Google Books and Project Gutenberg and grown to be one of the largest sources of scores anywhere. It claims to have 85,000 scores, or parts for nearly 35,000 works, with several thousand being added every month. That is a worrisome pace for traditional music publishers, whose bread and butter comes from renting and selling scores in expensive editions backed by the latest scholarship. More than a business threat, the site has raised messy copyright issues and drawn the ire of established publishers.

The site (imslp.org) is an open-source repository that uses the Wikipedia template and philosophy, “a visual analogue of a normal library,” in the words of its founder, Edward W. Guo, the former conservatory student. Volunteers scan in scores or import them from other sources, like Beethoven House, the museum and research institute in Bonn, Germany. Other users oversee copyright issues and perform maintenance. Quality control — like catching missed pages — is also left to the public. “It’s completely crowd sourced,” Mr. Guo said.

The site has recently begun adding recordings. And through a partnership with a freelance musician in Indiana who runs a publishing business, it offers low-cost, on-demand printing of the music, often at a tiny fraction of the cost of standard editions. The prices of major publishing houses range widely depending on the number of instruments in the work or its length. A set of parts for a mainstream string quartet, for example, can run from $30 to $50.

The score library project has turned classical music into the latest wrestling mat for conventional information purveyors — newspapers, book publishers, record companies — and the new digital forces, like Apple, e-book sellers, music-sharing sites and Mr. Guo, now a 24-year-old Harvard law student.

While a boon to garret-living, financially struggling young musicians, the library has caught the attention of music publishers.

“I don’t know if I would call it a threat, but I do believe it hurts sales,” said Ed Matthew, a senior promotion manager at G. Schirmer in New York. “It is that profit that helps us to continue to bring out more composers’ work.”

Universal Edition, a music publisher based in Europe, where copyright laws tend to be stricter, threatened a cease-and-desist order against the site for copyright violations in October 2007. Mr. Guo said he did not have the time or money to remove all the offending scores, so he took the site down completely and posted an emotional farewell. That, he said, galvanized followers to appeal to Universal.

Then he took action. Mr. Guo said volunteers checked every score — 15,000 at the time — for copyright violations. He set up a company, Project Petrucci, to take ownership of the site to remove personal liability. (Ottaviano Petrucci was an Italian Renaissance printer who produced some of the first impressions of music with movable type.) A disclaimer was made to appear before any score opens, saying that the project provides no guarantee that the work is in the public domain and demanding that users obey copyright law. The site operates from servers in Canada, where copyright law is generally looser.

“We cannot know the copyright laws of 200 countries around the world,” Mr. Guo said. “It is up to the downloader.”

In July 2008 the project came back online. Downloads have surged.

Some complaints still arise, especially from Europe, Mr. Guo said. “We say we are not bound by E.U. law,” he added, referring to the European Union. “Publishers usually go away.” Mr. Guo said no formal legal challenges were pending.

He shows publishers little sympathy.

“In many cases these publishers are basically getting the revenue off of composers who are dead for a very long time,” Mr. Guo said. “The Internet has become the dominant form of communication. Copyright law needs to change with it. We want people to have access to this material to foster creativity. Personally I don’t feel pity for these publishers.”

Those who “cling to their old business model,” he added, will simply fade away.

But publishers point out that users of the site can miss the benefit of some modern editions that may be entitled to copyright protection — and thus not part of the public domain — because of significant changes to the music, such as corrections and editing marks based on years of scholarship about the composer’s intention.

“You’re paying for something that’s worth more than the paper you’re receiving,” said Jonathan Irons, Universal Edition’s promotion manager in Vienna. “Everybody expects somebody else to pay for it.”

Music publishers also suggest that the site’s warnings to avoid copyright violations amount to little more than a wink.

Mr. Irons said Universal was unfairly maligned by its critics for doing what music publishers typically do: use revenue from the sale of old pieces to finance publishing of contemporary composers. “They think we’re sitting on our bums raking in cash, eating cake,” he said.

But he made an effort to sound conciliatory about Mr. Guo’s project, saying several times in an interview that “there’s room for both of us.” At the same time, Mr. Irons said, it is important to separate “this very valiant and completely kosher and clean repository of public material, which we perfectly endorse, and this kind of firebrand ‘We want to show the publishers they’re wrong’ kind of attitude.”

One blogger on music and technology, Gregory Beaver, who is also the cellist of the Chiara String Quartet, said in an e-mail that the site “has the potential to democratize printed classical music much as open source has democratized the programming world.” But it could stand “a great deal of technical improvement in both its organization of the data and the look and feel.”

Many important composers — including Stravinsky, Bartok and Messiaen — are barely represented or absent because the copyright has not expired for their works. But a number of contemporary composers have agreed to allow their works to be scanned under a Creative Commons license, which permits free online sharing as long as the originator is properly credited.

At least one professional group uses the site prominently. The Borromeo String Quartet plays from laptops with downloaded scores instead of sheet music. The digital music library is one of its major sources.

Mr. Guo said his drive to create a grand repository of music stemmed from his childhood in China, where his parents, both engineers, sent him to study violin at the elementary school of the Shanghai Conservatory. Browsing through a bookstore one day, he said, he was frustrated by how few orchestral scores were available.

His father took him to Vancouver, British Columbia, for high school when he was 13. Mr. Guo graduated a year early and entered the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston to study composition. There a world of scores, at the library and in music shops, lay open to him. But the memory of musical deprivation remained strong, and the idea of a bank of digital scores took flight.

“It was sort of the winter, and there wasn’t much going on,” Mr. Guo said. “I just thought this would be something that was a nice fit for my skill set. I’m a bit of a computer geek and a music geek and a law geek. That’s how I got started.”

And so, over a month during the New England winter, he built an early version of the International Music Score Library Project. “It was pretty ugly,” he said. He uploaded the first score: Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 1. “It was sort of a symbolic thing,” he said. The scan is there, dated Feb. 16, 2006. The uploader is listed as Feldmahler, Mr. Guo’s online handle, a name based on wordplay involving the composers Morton Feldman and Gustav Mahler.

The copyright questions stoked Mr. Guo’s interest in the law. Thus Harvard Law School. But that was not the only reason he enrolled. “Composing is very good until you have to pay your bills,” he said.

With the reports of billion-dollar valuations floating around other interactive Web sites, has Mr. Guo ever thought of trying to profit from his site?

“That’s really not my M.O.,” he said. “As a musician I have a duty to promote music. That’s the basic philosophy behind it.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 23, 2011

An article on Tuesday about a Web site created to make many classical music scores available free to the public misstated part of the site’s name. It is the International Music Score Library Project, not the Internet Music Score Library Project.

A version of this article appeared in print on February 22, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition.

Thanks for that, Allegro. I've always wanted exactly that -- a place where I could download public-domain classical sheet music. I'm so glad there's one available.

If the publishers go out of business, oh well. Seriously, they were just providing a service, and now that service is no longer needed. They need to adapt. I would bet that individual performing artists could easily sell their own editions of the music for some good money. You know, with commentary and their own notations and everything. Could even be bundled with video of their performances maybe. Just an idea. Hell, I'd pay for that if I had the bucks if and if I still had a piano to play.

[eyeno]

Google to merge user data across its services
Posted on 25 Jan 2012 - by Danish In: Technology

Google plans to start combining information the company collects about each user of its various websites and services into a single profile, the company announced on Tuesday.

Previously, Google said it did not create comprehensive profiles across its various properties, including its leading search engine, Android smartphone operating system and YouTube video site.

In a statement, Alma Whitten, a Google privacy director, wrote that the changes “will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.” She added, “Our recently launched personal search feature is a good example of the cool things Google can do when we combine information across products.”

That change, called Google Search Plus Your World, brought criticism from rivals Facebook and Twitter, which said that Google+ content now buries their own pages in Google’s search engine, and from people who do not care to use Google’s new social networ,
The new privacy policy, too, has already sparked concerns voiced on social networks, including on Google’s own platform.

“Google consolidating data — gives me some cause for concern,” Robert Mason, a professor of information technology at the University of Washignton, wrote publicly on his Google+ profile.

A Google spokeswoman declined to comment and instead referred CNN to Whitten’s statement and a brief document posted on the company’s website. The latter notes that Google does not sell users’ personal info to other companies, and that people who do not like the changes can close their accounts.

Google uses some of the data it collects based on people’s usage in order to deliver advertisements customized to individuals.

Whitten boasted in her company blog post that the single, shorter privacy policy should appease government regulators who have called for simplifications across the industry. Facebook made a similar claim last year when it removed much of the legal jargon from its privacy agreement.

Google’s new privacy policy will go into effect on March 1. It applies to everyone who is logged into a Google account while searching, checking Gmail, watching YouTube videos or downloading apps to an Android phone.

The company plans to send e-mails to users and post a notification on its home page about the changes, Whitten wrote.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

http://www.hottestinformation.com/2012/ ... -services/

[eyeno]

This is rich.

In addition to imposing loosely defined criminal sanctions to average web users, the ACTA treaty will also obligate ISPs to disclose personal user information to copyright holders. The measures introduce legislative processes that contradict the legal framework of participant countries and allows immigration authorities to search laptops, external hard drives and Internet-capable devices at airports and border checkpoints. The treaty is not limited solely to internet-related matters, ACTA would prohibit the production of generic pharmaceuticals and outlaw the use of certain seeds for crops through patents, furthering the corporate cartelization of the food and drug supply.

http://www.activistpost.com/2012/01/act ... ernet.html

[Bruce Dazzling]

Lots of links at the original...

Oh
JANUARY 25, 2012
Arthur Silber

The State laughs at you:

However, yesterday, a new theory surfaced that indicates Megaupload’s demise had less to do with piracy than previously thought. This theory stems from a 2011 article detailing Megaupload’s upcoming Megabox music store and DIY artist distribution service that would have completely disrupted the music industry.

TorrentFreak first reported about the service in early December 2011. ... Things were getting vicious in December but the quiet launch of Megabox might have been the straw that broke the millionaire’s back.

Dotcom described Megabox as Megaupload’s iTunes competitor, which would even eventually offer free premium movies via Megamovie, a site set to launch in 2012. This service would take Megaupload from being just a digital locker site to a full-fledged player in the digital content game.

The kicker was Megabox would cater to unsigned artists and allow anyone to sell their creations while allowing the artist to retain 90% of the earnings. Or, artists could even giveaway their songs and would be paid through a service called Megakey. “Yes that’s right, we will pay artists even for free downloads. The Megakey business model has been tested with over a million users and it works,” Kim Dotcom told TorrentFreak in December. Megabox was planning on bypassing the labels, RIAA, and the entire music establishment.

Lemme see. In a corporatist State -- where vastly powerful and wealthy companies and institutions form alliances with government precisely for the purpose of shutting out competitors and increasing their own power and wealth -- one group of vastly powerful and wealthy companies uses the State to eliminate a competitor and increase their own power and wealth.

Gee, think of that. How fantastically unexpected.

You know what's even better? This is an example of how things often aren't this or that. They're both. In this instance, the State puts into play one of its most cherished weapons -- fear -- as I discussed last week in "The State Is Not Your Friend":

When the State is intent upon controlling its population, when the State wants to end certain kinds of behavior, it doesn't need to punish everyone who engages in the disapproved behavior. It need only choose a few particularly visible and popular targets, which is precisely what it did when it chose Megaupload. Fear will do the rest.

This principle can be applied to all of the intrusions on personal liberty that are widely discussed at present ...

It is not the execution of State power that does most of the work. It is the fear of the execution of State power.

And the State confers an enormous benefit on its favored friends. Two for one! Such a deal.

We probably don't want to talk about this too much, for some of you might begin to wonder whether "the law" itself isn't worth a damn. And maybe "the rule of law" isn't the great defense of liberty most people think it is. Then you might get upset. I wouldn't want that.

But since I brought it up, perhaps I should confess my own view. How do I say this politely, in my constant efforts to observe the estimable norms of propriety and civility? Let's see, how's this:

To arrest your perhaps wandering attention, I announce my own perspective on this issue. With regard to what most people mean when they talk of the "sanctity" of "the law," I shit on it.

I shit on it repeatedly.

That's not very polite, I suppose. Gosh, I'm sorry. If you should want to see the reasons for my view, you can consult this article, and in particular the second part, entitled "Additional Means of Enforcement: The Law and the Rules."

And that's the point, you see. For the ruling class, "the rule of law" isn't a means of protecting you or your liberty. It's a means of enforcement, a critical way of protecting their own power and wealth.

But but but, someone challenges me, what about the Constitution and the ideals of the Founders? This might be rude, too:

What killed "democracy" in America? What gave the government over to the wealthy and powerful?

The Constitution. Of course.

The American Change in Management (formerly known as the "American Revolution," and we should work to make that "formerly" an actuality in usage) surely ranks as one of the more effective propaganda triumphs in history.

...

The Constitution created a government of, by and for the most wealthy and powerful Americans -- and it made certain (insofar as men can make such things certain) that their rule would never be seriously threatened. The most wealthy and powerful Americans were the ones who wrote it, after all.

For much more on the topic, including excerpts from Terry Bouton's valuable book, Taming Democracy: "The People," the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution, see my article, "Concerning the American Change in Management."

I sincerely hope none of this causes any discomfort. I would never dream of challenging anyone's cherished ideals.

Anyway, everything is going perfectly according to plan. But whose plan?, you might wonder. Ah, well...

[Nordic]

Ha. That's VERY interesting.

[JackRiddler]

.

Saw this today on the subway. It's one of several Google ads currently all over town:



The text:

Spot the difference?

Were you looking for a beetle that beeps or a beetle that buzzes? When you type in beetle we can guess you mean the car and not the insect if you’ve searched for cars recently. It makes things a little bit quicker and a whole lot easier for you.

To find out more about how Google uses information to make the web more useful go to google.com/goodtoknow.

Better slogan: Let Google Decide. Because you are a moron.

The ad's "you" is appropriately depicted, with a tiny stub-head and stub-hands that lack the fingers required to add the letters V and W to a search string.

Google's multiplatform ad campaign is a new level of creepy. Smart is passe. It's reached its own level of AOL. You may recall the AOL campaigns that basically confessed: Our only chance for business is to pitch stupid at the tech illiterate! Except AOL was desperately trying to get subscription business.

Don't have time to say a lot on the many deeper significations, but this is both a coming out for the new corporate governance of voluntary surveillance and a kind of distancing from or packaging of Google's "Be Evil" reveal. I mean: Google has already implemented their new policies, with or without the announcement. Unlike the old AOL ads, the announcement has no particular commercial function. It doesn't impact on revenue except as pure PR.

In the broader context of a broad-ranging multipolar assault on both Internet freedom and whatever remaining concept of privacy and individual protection against surveillance we have, Google apparently feels a need to make up some bullshit about why they're now explicitly unifying all profiles, dispensing with anonymity, personalizing and channeling and filtering your results, and practically hectoring you to brush your teeth. They may fear the SOPA-PIPA kind of outrage may one day hit them, which I think is a staggeringly remote possibility in the real-existing world. Be Evil? Yes! But Feel Guilty.

.

[JackRiddler]

Well, at least there are reasons to laugh at the absurdity of things:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201201 ... down.shtml

Hollywood Astroturf Group Releases Ad Saying It Needs SOPA To Shut Down Megaupload... Five Days After Megaupload Is Shut Down

from the you-guys-make-me-laugh dept

CreativeAmerica, the astroturfing group that pretends it's a "grassroots" operation -- but which is funded by the major Hollywood studios and run by former studio/MPAA execs -- is amazingly inept at communicating with the public, especially considering these guys are supposed to be communications experts. Remember, this is the same group who, while fighting for stronger laws against copying, flat out copied the email of anti-SOPA activists, and changed a few words to push their own pro-SOPA message.

Their latest move is even more bizarre. The group is touting its latest slickly produced propaganda film, insisting that SOPA/PIPA are needed for a variety of reasons -- almost none of which are true. It throws out the bogus claim of jobs being at risk, even though the evidence shows otherwise. But where it gets totally ridiculous is that the video focuses mostly on Megaupload and Kim Dotcom/Schmitz. The point of focusing on Megaupload? To claim that it can't be reached under existing law. Seriously. It talks about Megaupload for a while (claiming that it brings in $300 million per year -- which turns out to be 10x the actual number, by the way) and then says:

US law enforcement is only permitted to shut down US-based IP addresses. Overseas sites, like Megaupload and Megavideo, and the Swedish-based Pirate Bay, are out of reach.

Yes. And they're releasing this video five whole days after the US government showed that existing laws actually do allow them to reach Megaupload and shut it down. So, um, why do we need these new laws again?

Seriously, the video shows the level of lies that CreativeAmerica and the MPAA will spread to try to pass new, even broader laws. What's stunning is how blatant they are about it, releasing this video even after events from a week ago already proved it wrong.

Furthermore, almost everything else in that sentence is wrong, beyond just the idea that Megaupload was supposedly out of reach of US law enforcement. Current law enforcement can seize US domains, which are different from IP addresses. And, even more ridiculously, in the video, right before they claim that US law enforcement can't reach foreign sites... they show a clip of TVShack.net -- a UK-based site that the government seized and shut down (and is now trying to extradite its founder, student Richard O'Dwyer).

Why must CreativeAmerica lie? Perhaps because the facts just aren't on its side.

The video has a number of other problems. It relies heavily on Erik Barnett, Deputy Director for ICE, regularly seen in various press releases about ICE's program of illegally censoring websites. It really makes you wonder why a government official is appearing in a video for a lobbying group trying to pass new laws. Perhaps it's not illegal, but it certainly raises serious questions about the cozy relationship between ICE and the MPAA. Barnett has a history of being less than truthful about ICE activities. Last summer, you may remember, he flat out lied, in claiming that none of the sites seized by ICE were challenging the seizures, when he knew that a bunch of sites had already brought up challenges.

Now Barnett is claiming that this program of seizing domains without any due process is a huge success because they seized "the nine most popular content theft sites out there." Even ignoring the misuse of the word "theft" (shouldn't law enforcement know how to use the word properly?), this is laughable. I mean, elsewhere in the video, they claim that TPB and Megaupload are the two most popular, but they weren't seized when the video was made. Instead, what ICE seized was a bunch of hip hop blogs (that weren't even that big), including one that it held for a year before the Justice Department was forced to effectively admit that ICE totally screwed up and the domain had to be returned. Other domains are still being held in this manner as well. The fact that Barnett would flat out lie and pretend that this program of blatant censorship is some sort of big success... in an industry propaganda film, certainly raises some significant questions about ICE and how it's run these days.

The video has some other laughable moments... such as talking to Bruce Leddy, the writer/director of the film Wedding Weekend (originally called "Sing Now Or Forever Hold Your Peace" or "Shut Up And Sing"), who freaks out over the fact that his movie was available online, and is decrying all of the "losses." A couple problems with this. Wedding Weekend was apparently a terrible movie. The movie made a grand total of $15,998 on its opening weekend on 11 screens, and was out of theaters a week later, grossing a grand total of $20,903. And it wasn't because of infringement. It was because most people thought it was awful. Most of the professional reviews make it sound pretty bad, using words and phrases like "uneven," "less tolerable," "clunky narration," "one-trait characterizations," "the title is the least of the film's problems," etc. User reviews are more harsh. Over at Rotten Tomatoes one user notes:

This film is horrible. It has no redeeming features what so ever. I could criticise every single aspect of this film but I can't be bothered, it would be quicker for me to tell you about what is good about it. So here it goes, the only good thing about this film is that it has damaged the careers of everyone who worked on it. Hopefully. Never have I wanted to punch every single person on screen....

Somehow, I get the feeling that its availability online was the least of its problems. I'd be surprised if it actually got that many downloads at all. Meanwhile, we keep hearing stories of smart filmmakers embracing the internet, and giving people reasons to buy (starting with a better quality movie). He claims, "there's no recourse," but that's ridiculous. One only needs to look at the experiences of Louis CK to know that, even if your videos end up on torrent sites, if you handle it properly, you can still cash in. Leddy's failure to make a good movie and his subsequent failure to put in place a good business model is no excuse for passing a bad law with massive unintended consequences.

Still, this really shows the incredible desperation of the MPAA, though. The astroturf group it has created is really reaching in its efforts to come up with some sort of justification for SOPA/PIPA...