Posted on

Copyright infringement or How the big fat cats plan to curb down the illegal downloading

We know that entertainment industry is fuming over illegal downloading and it has long expressed frustration for Canadian unwillingness to modernize copyright laws.

Here comes Neil MacBride, a vice-president with the Business Software Alliance, a Washington D.C.-based company (dubbed industry association) that fights software piracy. The company he represents, sent out about 60,000 ‘notice and notice’ e-mails to Canadian users in 2006.
The notices contain language intended to scare the illegal downloaders.

Following is an example of the verbiage used by NBC Universal:
“This unauthorized copying and distribution constitutes copyright infringement under applicable national laws and international treaties. We urge you to take immediate action to stop this infringing activity and inform us of the results of your actions”

Canadian users are tracked by IP address when content is downloaded from the internet.The ISPs are the only ones who know what individuals are doing what and the three major Canadian internet service providers including Rogers, Bell and Telus have voluntarily agreed to distribute the notices to their customers on behalf of the industry associations. Telus forwards an average of 4,000 notices every month ( I have recently heard about a friend of a friend who got one). But allegedly they do not pass any personal information about the users to any of the groups initiating the notice e-mails.

Although tens of thousands of e-mails have been distributed over the last few years, no one has been prosecuted for copyright violation as a result of the notices.

“Notice and notice” differs from the “notice and take-down” program that’s in place in the United States. There, when an industry group notices an alleged copyright violation, an e-mail similar to the ones being sent to Canadian users is forwarded to the American ISP. In most cases, the ISPs are forced to immediately take down the content or face penalties.

In the UK there is a draft proposal to deal with the same issue; according to the draft, ISPs, including BT and Virgin Media will be required to take action against users who access illegal material. It’s called the “three-strikes” regime and the broadband companies who fail to enforce it would be prosecuted and the customer’s details could be made available to the courts.

Isn’t it funny how the big fat cats of the entertainment industry are complaining how they’re losing billions due to illegal downloading, yet at the same time report that they are making record profits?

And isn’t it strange how they can find ways to police the internet when big companies whine that their profits are being affected, but claim they are unable to do anything about the kids pornography?
Oh, yeah right! I forgot a small detail: it’s not copyright infringement, it’s just a kid’s life and who cares about all the freaking pedophiles, when the poor big studios can’t charge us $20 for a miserable recorded album or $30 for a movie that in four months from now would be sold for $9 or less?

If the cable and satellite providers won’t charge a leg and an arm for what they broadcast, people won’t steal the signal.
If a CD or DVD would cost a reasonable amount of money (see the movies sold for $4 at WalMart) people will buy, not download from the net.
That is the reality.

Posted on

A dangerous precedent : Kosovo

On Sunday February 17, 2008, Kosovo declared independence and only God and maybe the master puppeteers know what’s going to happen next.
One thing seems to be clear: a dangerous precedent has been established.
And where? In the Balkans, known for being ‘an accident waiting to happen’. The First War started because one guy, Gavrilo Princip shot the archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to Austrian throne

Maybe my opinions would not be considered strong enough to matter, therefore I will add to this post the article written by Patrick Buchanan with regards to the above subject.

February 19, 2008

Does Balkanization Beckon Anew?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
When the Great War comes, said old Bismarck, it will come out of “some damn fool thing in the Balkans.”

On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot the archduke and heir to the Austrian throne Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, setting in motion the train of events that led to the First World War.

In the spring of 1999, the United States bombed Serbia for 78 days to force its army out of that nation’s cradle province of Kosovo. The Serbs were fighting Albanian separatists of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). And we had no more right to bomb Belgrade than the Royal Navy would have had to bombard New York in our Civil War.

We bombed Serbia, we were told, to stop the genocide in Kosovo. But there was no genocide. This was propaganda. The United Nations’ final casualty count of Serbs and Albanians in Slobodan Milosevic’s war did not add up to 1 percent of the dead in Mr. Lincoln’s war.

Albanians did flee in the tens of thousands during the war. But since that war’s end, the Serbs of Kosovo have seen their churches and monasteries smashed and vandalized and have been ethnically cleansed in the scores of thousands from their ancestral province. In the exodus they have lost everything. The remaining Serb population of 120,000 is largely confined to enclaves guarded by NATO troops.

“At a Serb monastery in Pec,” writes the Washington Post, “Italian troops protect the holy site, which is surrounded by a massive new wall to shield elderly nuns from stone-throwing and other abuse by passing ethnic Albanians.”

On Sunday, Kosovo declared independence and was recognized by the European Union and President Bush. But this is not the end of the story. It is only the preface to a new history of the Balkans, a region that has known too much history.

By intervening in a civil war to aid the secession of an ancient province, to create a new nation that has never before existed and to erect it along ethnic, religious, and tribal lines, we have established a dangerous precedent. Muslim and Albanian extremists are already talking of a Greater Albania, consisting of Albania, Kosovo, and the Albanian-Muslim sectors of Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia.

If these Albanian minorities should demand the right to secede and join their kinsmen in Kosovo, on what grounds would we oppose them? The inviolability of borders? What if the Serb majority in the Mitrovica region of northern Kosovo, who reject Albanian rule, secede and call on their kinsmen in Serbia to protect them?
Would we go to war against Serbia, once again, to maintain the territorial integrity of Kosovo, after we played the lead role in destroying the territorial integrity of Serbia?

Inside the U.S.-sponsored Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the autonomous Serb Republic of Srpska is already talking secession and unification with Serbia. On what grounds would we deny them?

The U.S. war on Serbia was unconstitutional, unjust, and unwise. Congress never authorized it. Serbia, an ally in two world wars, had never attacked us. We made an enemy of the Serbs, and alienated Russia, to create a second Muslim state in the Balkans.

By intervening in a civil war where no vital interest was at risk, the United States, which is being denounced as loudly in Belgrade today as we are being cheered in Pristina, has acquired another dependency. And our new allies, the KLA, have been credibly charged with human trafficking, drug dealing, atrocities, and terrorism.

And the clamor for ethnic self-rule has only begun to be heard.

Romania has refused to recognize the new Republic of Kosovo, for the best of reasons. Bucharest rules a large Hungarian minority in Transylvania, acquired at the same Paris Peace Conference of 1919 where Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina were detached from Vienna and united with Serbia.

Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two provinces that have broken away from Georgia, are invoking the Kosovo precedent to demand recognition as independent nations. As our NATO expansionists are anxious to bring Georgia into NATO, here is yet another occasion for a potential Washington-Moscow clash.

Spain, too, opposed the severing of Kosovo from Serbia, as Madrid faces similar demands from Basque and Catalan separatists.

The Muslim world will enthusiastically endorse the creation of a new Muslim state in Europe at the expense of Orthodox Christian Serbs. But Turkey is also likely to re-raise the issue as to why the EU and United States do not formally recognize the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Like Kosovo, it, too, is an ethnically homogeneous community that declared independence 25 years ago.

Breakaway Transnistria is seeking independence from Moldova, the nation wedged between Romania and Ukraine, and President Putin of Russia has threatened to recognize it, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia in retaliation for the West’s recognition of Kosovo.

If Putin pauses, it will be because he recognizes that of all the nations of Europe, Russia is high among those most threatened by the serial Balkanization we may have just reignited in the Balkans.
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=12386

Thank you Pat Buchanan! And shame on the rest of the world for doing what they have just did.


Posted on

Mohamed Al-Fayed gets his day in court

It’s been ten years since the accident that killed Princess Diana in Paris.
And ever since then, Mohamed Al-Fayed, The Harrods tycoon and the father of Dodi Al-Fayed, has been trying to prove somehow that the death was not an accident but a murder, the result of a vast conspiracy involving lots of personalities, among them the ex-Prime Minister of U.K, Tony Blair, the secret services of Britain and France, the CIA, Prince Charles and Prince Philip and even Diana’s sister.

He is due to spend at least two days giving evidence to the inquest into the deaths of Diana and Dodi.
He listed as involved in the cover-up: butler Paul Burrell, every member of the Royal Family (although he recanted eventually the participation of the Queen), two Scotland Yard Commissioners, leading medical experts in London and Paris including two eminent professors Dominique Lecomte and Gilbert Pepin, newspaper editors, judges and the list goes on.

The coroner, Lord Justice Scott Baker, said: “There seems to be an awful lot of people involved in this conspiracy.”
Mr. Fayed said the leader of the death plot was Prince Philip, who he called a “racist, Nazi, and Frankenstein” who should be sent back to Germany where he came from.
Mr. Fayed repeated his claims that Diana was pregnant and was about to tell her two sons and announce her engagement to Dodi.

According to Mr. Fayed, Diana was scared for her life, claiming that she knew that Prince Philip and Prince Charles were trying to get rid of her.
Also, she allegedly mentioned a mystery box, said to contain important information and left in butler’s hands in case something would happen to the Princess.

Reading from a statement, Mr. Fayed said: “My belief that my son and Princess Diana were murdered was confirmed when I learned that the two leading Commissioners, Lord Condon and Lord Stevens, did not show the coroner the note made by a leading lawyer, Lord Mishcon, detailing the Princess’s fears for her life.” He added: “I cannot believe that they sat upon such an important note and did not pass it on to the (examining French magistrate) Judge Stephan in Paris and (the then coroner) Michael Burgess.

His allegations have been rebutted by hard evidence already heard by the inquest jury.

On the claim that Diana and Dodi were murdered because she wanted to marry him, a Muslim, the evidence showed that Diana had already had a serious two-year relationship with Muslim surgeon Hasnat Khanwith and that did not kill her or him.

On the claim that she was pregnant, just days after the crash even Fayed’s loyal PR Michael Cole officially dismissed pregnancy claims as untrue and the chambermaid on the Fayed yacht Jonikal bore witness to Diana’s contraceptive pills.

On the claim that bodyguard Trevor Rees Jones worked for MI6, even Fayed’s lawyer Michael Mansfield QC admits there is no evidence that Mr. Rees, who was injured in the crash, has ever been connected to the intelligence services.

Now, the ex-butler Paul Burrell is in hiding, following allegations that he had lied in court.
Apparently there is a tape with the former royal butler allegedly confessing that he lied under oath.
Burrell is recording saying that he held back the facts and threw in “a couple of red herrings” as he did not want to “give away secrets”.

Mr. Fayed now has to fight all the people saying that: the Princess was not pregnant, that she was not engaged to Dodi, that she was not in love with Dodi, that she still loved surgeon Hasnat Khan.
He is desperate to prove that there was a motive to murder Princess Diana. Because without a motive, there is no murder.

Mr. Fayed will spend another few days in the witness stand trying to bring proof to his allegations. After that the jury will be send out for deliberations, which may take another five weeks.

Posted on

Update on Qtrax

It looks like the fun is over before it even started.
The major labels, namely Sony BMG, Warner Music Group, Universal Music and EMI Group, previously listed as being on the same boat with Qtrax denied signing any deal.
EMI, Sony BMG and Warner had previous agreements with Qtrax while the company was testing a paid music download system. But the agreement expired last year and it has not been renewed to cover the free, ad-supported model boasted by Qtrax.

Reading the info on the new free download service I was quite surprised honestly speaking. I understood that Qtrax was supposed to address the cost issue via advertising done for the major labels.
I am thinking: people going on a site to copy music are free loaders and what is the chance for somebody like that to jump and buy whatever may have been advertised?

Apparently the concept of ad-supported music download it is not a new one. SpiralFrog is another ad-supported service, launched last September. The downloads can’t be burned on CDs or played on Apple machine either.


Posted on

Qtrax replacing Napster?

Long time ago it was Audiogalaxy. Splendid peer-to-peer file-sharing application.
Thanks to Audiogalaxy I got lots of hard-to-find songs. Unfortunately I lost them all during a computer upgrade.
Then it was Napster. Not as good as Audiogalaxy- in my opinion of course- but still good enough to find songs.
It was good until all that legal trouble with Metallica that felt robbed and sued Napster for loss of money.
The revamp Napster was a pay for song application and honestly speaking I don’t know if it’s got the same popularity as before the scandal.

Now it’s a new kid on the block, named Qtrax which boasts a selection of up to 30 million tracks.

Actually Qtrax has been launched sometimes in 2002 but shut down after a few months to avoid legal trouble.
Now the company is working with major record labels: Warner Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and EMI Group and the downloading is free.
To take advantage of the legally free service, the user need to download the Qtrax software which displays advertising while the user is searching and downloading songs.
The site will feature music videos, interviews and even tracks from live concerts recorded the night before.

What’s the catch? Here it is: downloads come with copy-protection technology, namely digital-rights management (DRM). Meaning that you can’t burn copies to CD, but you can store it indefinitely on PCs and transfer onto portable music players.
So far it’s not available for iPods and Macintosh computers. Allegedly it would be as early as March.
It remains to be seen if Apple would take some steps to block Qtrax files from working on iPods. Apple has its own version of DRM dubbed FairPlay.