Geographic

ISPs Give Mixed Response On BPI Attempt to Clamp Down
The BPI continued its policy of clamping down on illegal file sharing this week, when it contacted UK ISPs Cable and Wireless and Tiscali with requests to suspend 59 accounts.
BPI Chairman Peter Jamieson said, “We have demonstrated in the courts that unauthorised filesharing is against the law. We have said for months that it is unacceptable for ISPs to turn a blind eye to industrial-scale copyright infringement. We are providing Tiscali and Cable & Wireless with unequivocal evidence of copyright infringement via their services. It is now up to them to put their house in order and pull the plug on these people.”
In a statement, Cable and Wireless said “Cable & Wireless and its ISP, Bulldog, have an acceptable use policy that covers illegal file-sharing. This would normally mean that any accounts used for illegal file-sharing are closed. We will take whatever steps are necessary to put the matter right.”
Tiscali questioned the BPI’s approach – which saw the announcement being delivered to the press at the same time as the ISPs – and its evidence. In a letter to the BPI, Tiscali pointed out that “You have sent us a spreadsheet setting out a list of 17 IP addresses you allege belong to Tiscali customers, whom you allege have infringed the copyright of your members, together with the dates and times and with which sound recording you allege that they have done so. You have also sent us extracts of screenshots of the shared drive of one of those customers. You state that such evidence is “overwhelming”. However, you have provided no actual evidence in respect of 16 of the accounts. Further, you have provided no evidence of downloading taking place nor have you provided evidence that the shared drive was connected by the relevant IP address at the relevant time.”
In a statement on 12th July, the BPI stated “Early responses from both companies suggest that they will suspend accounts which have clearly been used for illegal filesharing” and indicated that it could supply detailed evidence on the other 16 Tiscali addresses. In an interview on More Four News Tiscali spokesman Richard Ayres said Tiscali’s message to the record industry is “Come to us, give us the details and we’ll absolutely work with you.” Which would seem to be in contradiction of Tiscali’s own letter, which also stated that “Tiscali does not intend to require its customers to enter into the undertakings proposed by you and, in any event, our initial view is that they are more restrictive than is reasonable or necessary.”
Whatever the outcome, the action represents a new approach to the copyright battle that is focused on service providers instead of individuals. Some feel that copyright infringement is being used as a way to stifle innovation and free speech.
Copyright activist Cory Doctorow, claimed that “The BPI is basically asking to replace the “notice-and-takedown” regime that allows anyone to censor any Web-page by claiming it infringes copyright with an even harsher regime: notice-and-termination, where the ability to communicate over the Internet can be taken away on the say-so of anyone who claims you’re doing something naughty with copyright…If this regime had been in place when VoIP was invented, there would be no VoIP”.
Coincidentally, the BPI action comes at the same time that the (US based) EFF launched its Frequently Awkward Questions for the Entertainment Industry. The FAQ features a number of pointed questions designed to counter the aggressive behavior of US copyright protection agencies such as the RIAA and MPAA. Among them are points such as “The RIAA has sued over 20,000 music fans for file sharing, who have on average paid a $3,750 settlement. That’s over $75,000,000. Has any money collected from your lawsuits gone to pay actual artists? Where’s all that money going?” and “The RIAA has sued more than 20,000 music fans for file sharing, yet file sharing continues to rapidly increase both online and offline. When will you stop suing music fans?” In the UK, the BPI has issued proceedings against 139 uploaders in the last three years. Of those, 111 settled out of court, paying up to £6,500 in settlement.
The BPI was noticeably absent from the group of industry organizations which gathered in London on the 12th of July to discuss new ways of charging for electronic distribution of copyright material. Their proposal, that “unlicensed intermediaries – rather than consumers” should be “the target of copyright enforcement actions”, was described as “ill-conceived and grasping” by Suw Charman, executive director of the Open Rights Group.
This fragmented and seemingly ad-hoc approach to the copyright issue is doing little to help the overall debate and a groundswell of resistance to both copyright and the way it is enforced has given birth to organizations such as the Pirate Party who demand wide-scale reform of the whole concept.
13 July, 2006
Microsoft Gets Huge €uro Fine
Microsoft have been fined by the European Commission for failing to comply with an anti-competitive ruling.
Their fine is unprecedented at €280.5 million ($375m, £193.8m) and covers a period from 16 December to 20 June at 1.5m Euro/day.
The EC threatens that it will raise the fine to 3m Euro/day if they continue to not comply beyond 31 July.
This tiff between Europe and Microsoft is related to the Media Player and “work group servers,” which Europe want to become more open, enabling other companies to compete against them.
The EC made a previous ruling against Microsoft in March 2004 when they threatened fines up to €497 million ($632m, £330m).
Europe have acted far more harshly that the US Justice Department which has been waiting for papers from Microsoft on a similar issue since 2002.
Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes was quoted by Reuters as saying, “Microsoft has still not put an end to its illegal conduct. I have no alternative but to levy penalty payments for this continued non-compliance. No company is above the law.”
12 July, 2006
Shaun Woodward Paints A Rosy Picture For UK Digital TV Switchover
Shaun Woodward (right) the MP famed for the twin disgraces of his defection from the Conservatives to Labour and a stint working with Esther Rantzen on That’s Life, is now Creative Industries minister and is busy singing the virtues of the UK’s Digital TV switchover plans.
According to the minister, there’s going to be a golden digital age in the UK as more and more employment is provided by the creative industries, our children enjoy interactive education, the sick benefit from Tele-medicine and the new technologies even help the government with transport and defence industries.
Woodward speaking last week at a Royal Television Society event, Digital Switchover- Making it Happen did not seem to think that finding the £26.99 that you can now buy a Freeview box from Argos for, would pose a problem amongst the financially challenged members of the electorate in the deprived St Helens constituency he now represents. Woodward in fact hinted obliquely that although they might fail to feed their children properly and many have high levels of debt, he’d observed some good ‘entertainment kit’ in their homes.
Accompanied by Ford Ennals (below right) the Chief executive of Digital UK, the body charged with making it happen, he made clear that BBC licence fee; although not yet agreed, would be settled by the end of the year and this was would fit in with the digital switchover schedule. ‘The Government needs to be satisfied that licence fee payers are getting value for money,’ he told the audience but he was ‘confident that they’ll get the right number’ at the end of the process of negotiation with the BBC.
Ennals revealed that surveys from trial areas indicated high levels of satisfaction particularly amongst the over 75s, who along with other vulnerable groups that might find the new technology challenging, would be getting assistance. Ennals is busy co-ordinating Digital UK’s nine project strands that include the thorny issue of resolving the platforms being made available to those in Multi Dwelling Units (that’s flats and the like to you and me).
The switchover which is being rolled out region by region, will swap out the old analogue transmissions with super new digital ones starting in what was the Border TV region in 2008 and finishing up, not as originally planned in London, but in the less challenging areas of Tyne Tees and Ulster thus avoiding any conflict with 2012 Olympic games coverage in the nation’s capital.
Digital UK had the current 98.5% coverage as a target and expects to meet this with additional coverage being by satellite, cable and broadband. Current figures indicate a rump of around 2% of refuseniks, those viewers content with a meagre 4 or 5 channels who see no value in multi-channel viewing, but expectations are this number will shrink as the digitisation spreads across the country like a warm front.
The average cost per household is predicted to be around £130 the extra costs are likely to be those second and third TV sets that are so easily forgotten, new rooftop aerials and replacement of analogue video recorders.
Woodward repeatedly refused to answer the question as to why the government felt it was the BBC’s responsibility to handle switchover issues rather than Government, who have been happy to find funding to subsidise the over 75s TV licence fees.
The Minister agreed that there were questions still to be resolved, like the value of continuing the current ‘gifting’ of spectrum to Public Service Broadcasters after switchover, and how the desire for High Definition would be met, but they were being evaluated so no need to worry there then.
Digital UK with stakeholders across industry and broadcasting would not make the mistakes seen in Italy, where a planned ‘big bang’ switchover for 2006 had not even registered as a moderate whimper. In the UK it is all so far going swimmingly and Ford thinks the BBC will be keeping up the good work as long as the BBC licence fee is agreed by year end as Shaun assured us it will.
12 July, 2006
Spend! Spend! Spend! Brits Head Up Euro Online Shopping League
With credit card-crazy Brits leading at the front, Europeans are spending ever more money online, with the yearly total for 2006 on course to hit €100bn.
According to new figures from Forrester Research, the 100 million Internet shoppers across Europe are shelling out a staggering €1,000 per person, with the buying-bonkers Brits spending more than anyone else, registering an average €1,744 for the year.
Jaap Favier, research director consumer markets at Forrester, commented that online sales are “building up every year in the countries where it started first, such as the UK or Sweden.”
Attributing the growth in e-commerce to the widespread adoption of broadband, Favier predicted that countries like France – who were late to the e-commerce party – are now only about two years behind the UK, and will soon have a higher growth rate in spending.
Favier added, “Consumers take about a year after going online before they will purchase something online. The first thing they purchase is either a book, a CD or a trip. Those people who have been online for a while are extending their buying into other categories such as clothing or electronics.”
So where’s the cash going?
According to Forrester, there’s a veritable tidal wave of cash heading for travel Websites, with over a third of all online spending going on booking flights and happy hols.
Favier predicts the travel boom will see an increase of 133 per cent over the coming five years, bringing the annual spend to €77bn by 2011.
Leisure is another Internet boomtown, as online off-licences and wine clubs rake it in, with Forrester predicting a thumping 283 per cent growth on leisure spending over the coming five years.
It’s a big happy-clappy rosy picture for overall e-commerce sales too, with online sales ready to more than double over the coming five years, reaching a cashtill rattling €263bn by 2011.
11 July, 2006
Significant Demand For WiFi On Trains: Study
The research was carried out by consultancy firm, Accent, after being commissioned by GNER will shock precisely no-one who has used a train on a regular basis. We’re sure that every laptop-toting rail-warrior will whole heartily agree with this one.
Interestingly Rob Sheldon, Managing Director of Accent, outlined how the availability of WiFi is dictating peoples travel patterns, “Many passengers commented that they look for Wi-Fi availability when choosing how they travel and 14% of those interviewed said that they were likely to make extra journeys by train over the next six months as a direct result of being able to use Wi-Fi onboard.”
GNER have lead the trend of providing WiFi on trains in the UK as far back as 2004, when they launched a service on the East Coast Main Line. The only downside has been the price of their service which, while free for first-class toffs, has been a punishing hourly rate for everyone else. We’re glad to see that they’ve dropped the price from the eye-watering £10 it used to be to a still-pretty-expensive-in-our-book £5/hour, £8/2 hours, £10 unlimited within 24 hours.
Three cheers for GNER for sticking to their complete coverage across its entire train fleet by August 2006 promise, which they brought forward from 2007, back in May.
If there is a consistent WiFi connection, it may lead to a peculiar situation where it will be better to make calls on a VoIP service rather than rely on the very patchy cellular service that you get on-board trains.
We trust that GNER won’t be publishing the passwords for the Wi-Fi service as they previously did for their internal system.
GNER WiFi page
11 July, 2006
US Democratic Party Adopt Net Neutrality
The US Democratic party has adopted net-neutrality as a party-political issue following the rejection of a second pro-neutrality amendment in a vote late last week.
Previously we reported on the demise of the first pro-neutrality amendment as part of the ongoing review of US telecommunications law.
The Senate Commerce Committee were tied at 11 for and 11 against, with Republican members voting against the amendment and Democrats for it. A majority vote is necessary for a bill to pass. Afterwards, Republican Senator for Alaska, Ted Stevens, gave his reasons for voting against the bill as well as displaying his obviously comprehensive grasp of the technicalities of the Web, “It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”
The Democratic party subsequently took up the issue with the slogan “Republicans: They sold the environment to Exxon, and sold the war to Halliburton. Now they want to sell the Internet to at&t.”
Former presidential candidate Senator John Kerry commented, “This vote was a gift to cable and telephone companies, and a slap in the face of every Internet user and consumer.” Another Democrat, Senator Ron Wyden, placed a ‘hold’ on the bill which temporarily stops further progress but a decision is inevitable and both sides are marshaling forces behind their cause.
Lawrence Lessig greeted news of Democratic support with caution, “Good for the Dems that they got it. Bad that the issue is now within the grips of party politics.” He acknowledged that, give the amount of money involved, political involvement was inevitable.
Many fear that the loss of net-neutrality will signal virtual civil war on the Internet and that commercial interests are having too much effect on the US Legislature. Jeannine Kenney, Senior Policy Analyst, Consumers Union offered a concise summary, “The network neutrality nondiscrimination principle, which protects competition, maximizes consumer choice, and guarantees fair market practices, is one step closer to being abandoned with the Senate Commerce Committee’s vote. This endangers the most important engine for economic growth and democratic communication in modern society. Nondiscrimination made possible the grand successes of the Internet. Its removal can take them away.”
6 July, 2006
Ofcom GPS Repeaters Ruling May Hit Mobile Phone GPS
Ofcom has just issued guidance that GPS repeaters are probably illegal in the UK, both in their use and their sale.
In their dry language, “Any person who places this type of apparatus on the market or uses it in the UK is likely to be committing an offence.”
Medium term this action could hit the wave of GPS-equiped mobile phones that are a year or so away, and the location-based services that they’ll bring.
GPS repeaters use radio signals to pass Global Positioning (GPS) or other Radionavigation Satellite system (RNSS) location information between units. Unless the operators have specific licenses, they be breaking the law in the UK.
GPS devices need to be able to receive the positional information from satellites. Initially this involved having line-of-sight to the ‘birds’, but as chip-sets have improved, they’ve become more sensitive, so requiring less direct sight. If GPS units work within buildings, they do so at the sacrifice of accuracy. Even with the chip improvements, GPS will not work within buildings, and certainly not underground.
We spoke to Jenny Bailey, Technical Director of J-Squared to get the low-down. J-Squared were funded by the DTi 3 years ago to develop a GPS repeater system, which they subsequently received a patent.
Jenny told us the major current use for GPS repeaters is by the emergency services. Ambulances stations are equipped with them to ensure their on-board GPS ‘know’ where they are as they leave, speeding them to their location. Police and firefighting services also benefit from being able to locate their personnel within buildings.
In the medium term, Ofcom will create quite a kerfuffle with this ruling. Mobile phones will, within a couple of years, be commonly equipped with GPS, enabling location-based information and services. These will not work within buildings without GPS repeaters, knocking their broad usefulness on the head. We’d imagine that the mobile companies will be on the phone to Ofcom sharpish.
Ofcom is becoming increasingly stringent on the ‘unauthorised’ use of radio spectrum. One of their Big Ideas is to auction off radio spectrum to the highest bidder and if people are using it without paying for it, the whole idea becomes undermined.
Given the inevitability of the march of mobile phones, it could be that Ofcom are acting as King Canute, but in this case attempting to hold back radio waves.
Ofcom GPS or GNSS signal repeaters ruling
J-Squared
Indoor Positioning Limited
4 July, 2006
UK Consumers Are Lapping Up Convergence
Brits are going wild for the latest technological innovations according to market research firm GfK in its biannual ‘UK Technology Barometer report.’
The study rates smartphones, Webcams, communication devices and storage products as the hot! hot! hot! categories registering the fastest growth, while the major overall trends are seen as convergence, the growth of wireless, and the continued tumble of technology prices.
The report highlighted on the site of our dear friends Pocket Lint concludes that UK punters are getting down with the convenience of multi-function devices, as GfK IT Business Group Director Jean Littolff explains, “Not only are we looking at convergence within IT sectors, but also a blurring of lines between IT, consumer electronics, telecoms, and photo areas”.
Wi-Fi usage continues to grow massively across Blighty, with sales of 3G cards soaring by 475%, mostly to the business community.
In the consumer market, sales of Wi-Fi routers have also shuffled in an upward direction, registering a 77% growth.
Not surprisingly, smartphones continue to set the cash tills ringing with a big increase in sales, while single-function PDAs are carrying on their slow decline, with sales slumping by 38.3%.
Rapidly falling notebook prices have led to more laptop-toting peeps, encouraged by the average price dropping from £808 in the first half of 2005 to £686 in the first half of 2006.
Bursting with tech-tastic confidence, Littolff added, “With price barriers falling, the major obstacle preventing the average consumer from enjoying the sexy technology long enjoyed by business users is gone, and little seems to impede the anti-Luddite sentiment of the British spending public”.
4 July, 2006
Net Neutrality Matters
Imagine a world where Internet performance is controlled by the company who owns the cables and where speed is sold to the highest bidder. Imagine a world where some Web sites load faster than others, where some sites aren’t even visible and where search engines pay a tax to make sure their services perform at an acceptable speed. That’s the world US Telecommunications companies (telcos) such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner are trying to create.
The debate centres around the ongoing review of the US Telecommunications Act and the concept of network neutrality (net-neutrality). The telcos have been lobbying congress to allow them to introduce priority services ensuring that the fastest data transfers and best download speeds are sold at a premium rate. The telcos position is widely seen to be in conflict with the most fundamental assumptions about what the Internet actually is.
To the lay person, it may seem like a laughable proposition. As Cory Doctorow (FreePress) put it, “It’s a dumb idea to put the plumbers who laid a pipe in charge of who gets to use it.” And yet the US congress is swaying towards the view of the telcos, so what’s going on?
The debate was kick-started in November 2005 when AT&T CEO, Ed Whitacre commented, “Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?”
Whitacre’s argument boils down to the assumption that services such as Google and Yahoo are somehow freeloading on the infrastructure owned by the telcos. Cory Doctorow points out a fundamental flaw in his reasoning, “Internet companies already are paying for bandwidth from their providers, often the same companies that want to charge them yet again under their new proposals.”
As Doctorow and other commentators have observed, Internet users and businesses already pay proportionally for their use of the net, allowing the owners of the infrastructure to take a further cut distorts the market in favour of those with the deepest pockets and threatens innovation and the development of new services.
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, weighed in to the argument saying “Net neutrality is this: If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level. That’s all. Its up to the ISPs to make sure they interoperate so that that happens.”
The debate in the US is split largely along partisan lines with Republicans favouring the telcos and Democrats siding with the pro-neutrality lobby. Since Whitacre started the debate, the telcos have promoted their case heavily using extensive television advertising and lobby groups. The pro-neutrality group (comprising the bulk of the industry) has organised itself with activist Websites such as save the internet and has signed up over a million individuals to its petition, but the campaign is not going well. On May 8th the House of Representatives passed the “Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006,” or COPE Act while defeating an amendment (the so-called Internet Platform for Innovation Act of 2006) that would have provided protection for neutrality. The next opportunity for progress comes this week when the Senate votes on Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2006 which also carries a neutrality friendly amendment.
Today, the legal Website Outlaw reported that two US Attorney Generals (Eliot Spitzer and Bill Lockyer) have backed the pro-neutrality cause. Spitzer wrote a letter stating that “Congress must not permit the ongoing consolidation of the telecommunications industry to work radical and perhaps irrevocable change in the free and neutral nature of the Internet”.
Whatever Spitzer and Lockyer’s influence, many commentators believe this kind of corporate influence on communications can only lead to economic censorship. As law professor and copyright activist Lawrence Lessig said in 2004 “The Internet was designed to allow competition and let the best products and content rise to the top. Without a policy of network neutrality, some of those products could be blocked by broadband providers”.
28 June, 2006
NSA To Harvest Social Networks?
Think carefully the next time you edit your Flickr or Myspace profile. New Scientist reported last week that the Pentagon’s National Security Agency (NSA) “is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.” For many the move is hardly surprising given the ongoing erosion of personal privacy as a result of 9/11 and makes George Orwell and Philip K Dick’s dark imaginings about the workings of big government (they gave us the concepts of thought-crime and pre-crime respectively) a depressing reality.
Many are saying that it bears all the hallmarks of the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program or the “blueprint for the total surveillance society” as it was dubbed by Lee Tien of the EFF. The program aimed to gather digital information from a variety of sources to aid in the tracking and capture of terrorists but was suspended in 2002 after a public outcry over privacy.
The New Scientist report speculates that the NSA plans to use semantic-web tools to plot connections between individuals. A paper promoting just such a process was delivered at the WWW2006 in Edinburgh last month. The paper, titled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, described how conflict of interest in the scientific peer review process could be avoided by plotting the relationships between individuals, by analyzing the RDF tags of data from the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) social software service and the computer science bibliography website DBLP. New Scientist noted that the research was part-funded by Advanced Research Development Activity who spend the NSA’s research cash.
This news follows the report by USA Today on June 1st that the FBI had asked companies including Google, Microsoft and AOL (amongst others) to store Web usage histories for up to two years to assist with the investigations into child pornography and terrorism. Lee Tien observed that the Justice Department was “asking ISP’s to really become an arm of the government”.
In Europe, the adoption of similar approaches has been attempted with less success. In 2003 the UK All Party Internet Group (APIG) recommended that the government abandon plans to get ISP’s to store usage data for six years but should still ask the companies to keep data as and when law enforcers required.
The APIG report (PDF), which was delivered ahead of the consultation process for the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) Part 2, made the specific recommendation that
“a specific prohibition should be put into RIPA to prevent access to communications traffic data for ‘predictive use’. If particular patterns of behaviour were highly correlated to criminal behaviour then it might become possible for ‘fishing expeditions’ to detect these patterns to be seen a proportionate action. We agree that this type of access to traffic data raises considerable concern and do not believe it should be permitted under an ‘internal authorisation’ regime.
In September 2005 the European Commission adopted a proposal that would see telecommunications data held for one year and Internet data for six months and, last month, the European Court annulled the agreement which compelled airlines to submit private data on passengers flying to the US.
It’s not just us that thinks that the Global War on Terror has been used by governments on both sides of the Atlantic to infringe personal liberty with precious little evidence of positive results. Privacy groups have warned about the dangers of “automated intelligence profiling” citing the potential for inaccuracies, misuse and abuse.
Governments have hardly proven themselves capable custodians so far. In the UK recent blunders at the Home Office have seen thousands of individuals wrongly branded as criminals due to inefficient manual administration systems. Add government fecklessness to the huge quantity of incomplete, exaggerated and plain wrong data entered by ourselves about ourselves on social software sites and you could have the ingredients for a totalitarian, bureaucratic hell, worthy of Kafka.
12 June, 2006