However, in a flashback to the heyday of the original Napster in the late 1990s, a rediscovery by a few users of an old Winamp trick has resulted in subscribers being able to download any number of tracks, which are then no longer tied to the subscriber’s PC and digital music players. Using only a slightly-tweaked version of Winamp, it’s possible to convert the DRMed WMA files used by the music service into much larger WAV files. Those can then either be burned to CDs, or converted to another lossy format.

Upon being contacted for comment, a Napster spokesperson noted that the company has long been aware of the potential to bypass the subscription system, and claimed that the hack does not threaten their subscription model… However, Napster is counting on free 14-day trials to Napster-To-Go as a way to sell people on the idea that rented music is a Good Thing so they can challenge Apple’s lead in the online music scene.’

Source: Eric Bangeman, Ars Technica

Those sites are fighting back, as attorneys from the Electronic Frontier Foundation defending them filed a brief in Santa Clara Superior Court arguing that the subpoenas violate First Amendment protections long enjoyed by journalists. Saying that the sites “cannot be compelled to disclose the source of any information procured in connection with their journalistic endeavors, nor any unpublished information obtained,” the lawyers argue that journalistic privilege applies equally to print and online publications.’

Source: Eric Bangeman, Ars Technica

You can download the software, euphemistically known as LogFinder, here. Of course, I think the question everybody is asking is whether this utility itself keeps a log of what it deletes! Or perhaps more importantly, could regular and automated usage of this tool be considered wilful destruction of evidence or comprise an attempt to pervert the course of justice?

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation

If granted, this patent will join other examples of USPO silliness in the IP Hall of Shame, including:

• Method of Swinging on a Swing
  Patented by a five year-old child from Minnesota, United States, this patent describes a way of swinging laterally on a child’s swing (you know, the one where you swing side to side). Unsurpringly, the applicant’s father is a patent attorney.

  …a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other.

• Method of Exercising a Cat (with a laser pointer)
  I’ll bear this one in mind the next time I have the urge to enrage somebody’s cat, though when it comes to animal exercise I prefer to provide some incentive:

  [C]onsists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct.

• [Peanut] butter and jelly food slice
  This isn’t quite as capricious as it looks; it’s actually a ‘pre-formed nut butter and jelly food slice that enables a person of any age to easily and quickly make a nut butter and jelly sandwich’. It’s still a little bizarre, however:

  A volume of nut butter is placed within the hollow region, and is thereby totally encapsulated between the first and second layers of jelly. Also provided is a method and apparatus for making nut butter and jelly slices. Finally, a jelly slice dimensioned to fit on a food substrate and jelly suitable for making jelly slices or nut butter and jelly slices are provided. The jelly slices and the nut butter and jelly slices may be individually wrapped in flexible coverings and packaged in a single food container.

Stay tuned for more exciting adventures from the land of the Whimsical Patent.

The defendants were originally accused of carrying out attacks on behalf of Jay Echouafni, a Massachusetts businessman who sold satellite TV gear via his website. At an August 26, 2004 press conference, Attorney General John Ashcroft said the attacks cost the victims, who were competitors of Echouafni, over $2 million in lost revenue and mitigation efforts.

Media reports last summer referred to Echouafni and his henchmen as the “DDoS mafia.” … His attorney, Richard Cline, declined to comment on the case. Kirch said he recently spoke with Ashley, and he believes Ashley is remorseful and hopes to arrange a plea agreement with prosecutors.

Source: Brian McWilliams, O’Reilly Network

Alan Cohen, chief marketing officer for Napster, told reporters ‘the 99-cent-download model will be a thing of the past’:

Why would anyone spend $10,000 with Apple to get 10,000 songs when they could have 10,000 for $US15 a month from Napster? The flaw in the argument is that most buyers have iPods and most buy only a few hundred songs, making $US15 a month for rental of Napster’s library not as cheap as it sounds.

It’s interesting to see just how much Apple is benefiting from locking down their proprietary digital rights management API. The very technology that hinders and frustrates users of their products is seemingly being used as their primary draw card. Apple exploits FairPlay both defensively (to prevent distribution by casual users) and offensively (to provide a disincentive for users switching to alternative products). The effect is to create an artificially-supported market for their iPod while discouraging users from trying other music services.

The irony is all too clear: just two years ago, Apple was themselves conducting their famous ‘switch’ campaign. Now — like they accused Micrososft of doing - they’re using technology to monopolise their market and maintain an immobile user base. Customers at Apple’s iTunes Music Store are now unable to change their digital audio player, effectively locked into a single hardware and software platform if they want to continue listening to songs they purchased. I fear that — unless Apple begins licensing their DRM technology to other music stores — the online music market will falter and stagnate.

Source: Garry Barker, The Age

The Paris District Court has sanctioned Google and its French subsidiary from selling search-related advertisements against trademarks owned by the luxury fashion designer, which sued the search giant in early 2004. The court charged Google with trademark counterfeiting, unfair competition and misleading advertising. Google was ordered to pay $257,430 (200,000 euros):

The ruling comes on the heels of another French court order against Google, in a case brought by European chain Le Meridien Hotels and Resorts. In that lawsuit, the court said Google infringed on Le Meridien’s trademarks by allowing the hotel chain’s rivals to bid on keywords of its name and then appear prominently in those related search results.

Tassarch describes a novel solution to the problem:

Google could easily make it a policy that if you sue them, they blacklist you. They have no obligation … to index your site. It’s their servers and their software, so they can do whatever they want with it (sic). Actully, you could even make a strong argument that they have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders to avoid lawsuits, so blacklisting the trademarks of hostile companies is just good business practice.

Source: Stefanie Olsen, CNET News

More than a month after Walton was buried in Beckley, a group of record companies named her as the only defendant in a federal lawsuit. They claimed Walton made more than 700 pop, rock and rap songs available for free on the Internet under the screen name “smittenedkitten.” On Thursday, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America acknowledged that Walton was probably not the smittenedkitten it is searching for.

What’s most surprising about this is not that the defendant lacks a computer (after all, the RIAA has accused computer-illiterate grandmothers of sharing copyrighted rap music before) or, indeed, an existence; instead, what I find peculiarly perplexing is that their lawyers continue to rely on automated (and, clearly, inaccurate) detection processes to identify targets; further, they fail to perform even rudimentary background research into their potential targets (eg, whether they’re still alive) — despite their recent pledge to do so.

I suppose one can forgive the occasional slip when several thousand defendants are routinely the subjects of litigation (the clerks in their county must be doing quite handsomly). However, considered in light of the RIAA’s track record in these matters — which, I might add, includes such notable actions as RIAA v Lahara, a 13 year-old student, and RIAA v Ward, a macintosh-using grandmother) — this suit is the final nail in the coffin for the authority of their ‘moral’ campaign against filesharing.

many diverse groups of people are embracing BitTorrent, and the number of sites hosting torrent files is growing by the day. This fragmentation makes tracking down central sites difficult, if not impossible, and also shows how easy it is to host a front-end to torrents. Projects like BlogTorrent will only drive this trend more and more mainstream… [S]earch engines like TowerSeek.org will help unite these disparate sources of information, and make things easy to find, regardless of where the files are.

It is thus an interesting side effect of the RIAA’s crusade against private acts of copyright infringement that they have transformed what was essentially a centralised, easily manipulable distribution network (Napster, Kazaa) into what are now many decentralised systems far less susceptible to monitoring or control. Monkey Methods describes the resulting situation as a ‘fragmented ecosystem of thousands of centralised servers.’

Filesharing must increasingly be looking like a hydra to the RIAA: for every litigation they instigate, every cease and desist they deliver, ten more websites and a hundred more users begin in earnest. Filesharing thus looks set to continue in spite (or even because) of their continued efforts to enforce non-digital business practices in intangible cyberspace.

The Commissioner made clear that ‘any agreement will need to strike a fair balance between different interests’, and that ‘a constructive dialogue between the Council and Parliament will be vital for an agreement.’ He does have the option to deny a new first reading. But given the strength of feeling in the Parliament and the concerns of so many member states in the Council, the Parliament request looks like the best way to [move] forward…

In an area of law so routinely influenced by lobbyists and those with vested interests in locking up software engineering techniques, more balance can only be a good thing.

Source: Eric Bangeman, Ars Technica

Q: What would you advise the legal community regarding the advance of nanotechnology? A: We are in the ‘Age of innovation.’ Society is changing not only through nanotechnology, but in connection with converging technologies integrated at the nanoscale, impacting policies about investments, laws, and education. The legal system is important to guard personal freedom of decision and the right of each individual to have access to the best information in a society expected to become more complex because of the rapid advance of these technologies.

The interviewees identify several areas of law as being impacted by new research: foremost, intellectual property. Various issues are associated with the development of new structures and substances. For instance, while one can quite clearly patent a molecule (see, eg, the unfortunately-titled Nano-Tsunami), to what extent can core elements of the research be protected by patent? Will the law limit the scope of protections to ensure scientific advancement is not monopolised by patent-hungry corporations? Another legally interesting implication is actions under the civil law seeking compensation for disease and contamination. Can researchers be sued in negligence for the actual — or possible — side-effects of their research?

Source: Sonia Miller, New York Law Journal

As a result, it’s no longer legal to publish current photographs of the Eiffel Tower at night without permission. Technically, this applies even to amateurs. When I spoke to the Director of Documentation for SNTE, Stéphane Dieu, via phone last week, he assured me that SNTE wasn’t interested in prohibiting the publication of amateur photography on personal Web sites. “It is really just a way to manage commercial use of the image, so that it isn’t used in ways we don’t approve,” said Mr Dieu.

It’s probably not as darstedly as it sounds for copyright to be used defensively to protect a building design — or even an entire cityscape — from unauthorised reproduction. However, the restrictive terms under which STNE allows photographs of the Tower to be pubished seem more likely to hinder creativity by creating pointless aproval procedures than to promote it.

Further, if the protection was ever exploited more aggressively (for example, by requiring all images of the Tower to be purchased or licensed from the gift shop), photographers everywhere would be deprived of what is a most spectacular subject. Images like this and this would no longer be possible (indeed, the latter is already — without payment of royalties — impermissible). The law of equity notwithstanding, Parisians are reliant on the STNE to use their legal rights reasonably. In entrusting the reasonableness of copyright law to the rights-holder, are we not recklessly putting our rights at the mercy of capricious and profit-driven entities?

To some antispam crusaders, the surge comes as no surprise. They had long argued that the law would make the spam problem worse by effectively giving bulk advertisers permission to send junk e-mail as long as they followed certain rules:

“Can Spam legalised spamming itself,” said Steve Linford, the founder of the Spamhaus Project, a London organisation that is one of the leading groups intent on eliminating junk e-mail. And in making spam legal, he said, the new rules also invited flouting by those intent on being outlaws.

Source: Tom Zeller Jr, New York Times

The latest bout of legal action brings the total number of individuals sued for filesharing to almost 8500. The RIAA last initiated a round of lawsuits in December 2004, targeting 754 alleged copyright infringers.

Source: Tony Smith, The Register

Where software is developed under contract by a third party, these risks are particularly important and less able to be controlled by the client. Though often unrealised, they are increasingly the subject of forced indemnification by the developer:

it is commonplace to demand that software produced ‘for hire’ by independent contractors be indemnified from patent violation. Since this is impossible, what contractors do is to buy insurance, which is hideously expensive. We are talking about tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of Euros here. Small businesses generally cannot afford it, so they simply cross their fingers and pray they are not sued. Those rare ones that can afford such things are treated to an experience that has the same flavour as paying the Mafia ‘insurance’ to make sure that one’s business does not burn down.

Though it seems unlikely to halt the continued popularity of licenses like the GPL, the prospect of getting sued is becoming an issue for many open source developers. I anticipate that as market demand for low-cost IP insurance increases, the costs of loss distribution will rapidly decline.

Source: Jeffrey Causey, IP Wars