Author Archives: eric

Copyright and 3D objects

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In march, I reported that The Pirate Bay added a new category of torrents dedicated to physibles.  Physibles are files that describe 3D objects for 3D printers. I was also betting that we would soon hear aboutthe first litigation about copyright and 3D objects.

 

It did not take long.   Thomas Valenty designed two figurines inspired from the famous Warhammer game.  He shared his physibles on thingverse, which is the reference site for physibles.  End of May 2012, Games Workshop, the flag ship company for game figurines such as Warhammer or AD&D, sent a takedown notice to Thingverse using the DMCA.  Thingverse removed the physibles. 

 

We will soon more and more such cases.  It will be simple when the gimmick is a good replicate of a copyrighted item.  But what if it is slightly different?   See the ongoing, world wide, copyright battle between Apple and Samsung regarding the shape of the Galaxy versus iPad…

Nano counterfeiting feature

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The blue  morpho butterfly changes the color of iits wings through some special reflective structure.  The company nanotech security uses a “similar” trick for its NOtES (Nano Optic Technology for Enhanced Security).   Using nano holes smaller than the light wave, it creates a kind of light-amplification that generates a similar effect.

 

Thus, by embossing paper or plastic, it can create bright images through reflection.  The holes are about a few hundred nanometers.  How does it fit with security?   According to them, it could replace holograms used against counterfeiting (the kind of holograms that you find on microsoft official disks).  This technology seems to have some advantages:

  • It is extremely cost effective.  Once the master stamping build, it is just stamping the target, thus cheap and fast in production.
  • Easily identifiable by human
  • As it works infrared or UV, the pattern could be analyzed by machines using the right wave length (a kind of watermark)

 

The security relies on the difficulty for the counterfeiters to reproduce the stamping.  It seems that it relies mainly on a high barrier entry cost (class 1 clean room) and know how of the company to design the pattern and the stamping tool.   Clearly, it would require a funded organization to make it (as holograms today).   Nevertheless, I would be interested to see if it would be not possible to reverse engineer the pattern by careful examination through electronic microscope. Another question is how does it degrade with time?     

When will we have the first shiny bank notes?

You are what you wear

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Usual knowledge is that what you are wearing has some influence on the perception of your interlocutors.   When visiting a therapist, would you  trust more the one  in shorts and torn tee shirt than the one formally dressed?   But  do your clothes have some influences on your behavior?

This is what ADAM Hajo and GALINSKY Adam  explored in their paper “Enclothed cognition”.  And their findings are interesting.

Yet, the clothes we wear have power not only over others, but also over ourselves.

Clothes have influence on our behavior and even efficiency!  To prove that, they set up an experiment comparing the respective performance on completing a task between people wearing a white labcoat and people without the labcoat.   The first group performed better than the second group.

We posit that wearing clothes causes people to “embody” the clothing and its symbolic meaning.

This is even more interesting.  It is actually not the cloth itself but rather its symbolic meaning that impacts the wearer.  In another experiment, they created three groups;  the first group wore  a white labcoat that was announced to be for doctors.  The second group wore the same white labcoat but this time it was announced to be for painters.   The third group did not wear any labcoat.   The first group consistently performed better than the two other groups.   The people wearing a “painter” labcoat performed not better than people without a labcoat.

How is that related to security?   SOCIAL ENGINEERING!  We already knew that  you’d better be dressed in a way consistent with is expected from the role you are try to mimic. This helps to trick the target and to create good ground for trust;  here clearly, clothes carry a strong symbolic meaning that influences the victim.  Uniforms carry a message of order, authority and strength.  Labcoats carry a meaning of science, and expertise. ..   It seems that these clothes may also help the social engineer to  perform better his “supposed” role. 

By the way, in our daily life, could this trick help to boost our performances?

Reference

H. Adam and A.D. Galinsky, “Enclothed cognition,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 48, Jul. 2012, pp. 918–925 available at http://www.utstat.toronto.edu/reid/sta2201s/labcoatarticle.pdf.

Pending extradition for a UK alleged pirate

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In  December 2007, UK citizen Richard O’Dwyer established  the TVShack site.   TVShack did not contain any copyrighted files but   actually linked to  illegal contents stored on third party owned websites.  As such, the site was not hosting illegal contents (as MegaUpload did).  Nevertheless, it  was a facilitator as it helped to locate illegal contents.  This site soon became a  success.  The US authorities estimate that it made about $230,000 of advertisement.  The site was among the first ones that were strike by Immigration and Customs Enforcement domain seizure strategy. 

In May 2011, the US Justice Department asked for the extradition of Richard O’Dwyer under the two charges of  conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and criminal infringement of copyright.   The defense of O’Dwyer argued that the extradition was not valid because TVshack  servers were not hosted  in the US.  On January 2012, an English judge ruled that O’Dwyer could be extradited to US.   On March,  UK home secretary Theresa May approved the extradition.   Of course, soon an appeal against the extradition was presented.

In June, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, launched an online campaign to collect signatures to stop the extradition.  The site has already collected  more than 237,000 signatures.   Recently, Theresa May confirmed that she will not reverse her decision, regardless of the potential success of the online petition.  We will have to wait for the result of the appeal in the coming months.

As I am not a lawyer, I will not comment on the  (il)legality of this extradition.  Clearly, the US authorities try through such actions (like for Megaupload) to demonstrate that:

  1. No country is safe if you are infringing copyright on US industry
  2. Even facilitating copyright infringement can be prosecuted