Author Archives: wunderbarb

Update of the French law related to private copy

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On 29 November 2011, the French Assembly approved the text 776.  On 20 Dec ember 2011, the French Senate approved the “LOI n° 2011-1898 du 20 décembre 2011 relative à la rémunération pour copie privée (1)”.  This law fixes the current law about private copy.

 

The most interesting part is in article 1.  

… le mot : « réalisées » est remplacé par les mots : « réalisée à partir d’une source licite »

It states that a private copy has to be done from a lawful source.  This was not the case for the previous version.  The main point for the private copy was that its use should be personal.  this modification closes a nice hole.  Interestingly, the source has to be lawful, but not necessarily yours.  This opens some interesting possibilities, for instance for public libraries that have lawful sources.  See the French post: Copie privée et licéité de la source : des conséquences inattendues pour les bibliothèques ?

Wolverine, the final episode of the leakage?

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In April 2009, a work in progress version of movie “Wolverine” appeared on P2P sites.  This leakage did not prevent Wolverine to become a commercial success.  Nevertheless, Fox was really unhappy.

On December16,  2009, Gilberto Sanchez was arrested by FBI for having posted a copy of the movie on Megaupload.  According to him, he purchased the movie on a counterfeit DVD for $5.  Then, he uploaded it on Megaupload on sent the links to friends.  Soon, it became a blockbuster on the Darknet. 

In December 2011, he has been sentenced to one year in a federal prison and one year of supervised release.  For memory, Kerry Gonzalez who leaked out Hulk in 2003 was sentenced 6 months of jail, a $2,000 fine and $5,000 of restitution to Videndi. 

Gilberto Sanchez is a glass installer.  Thus, he is not in the media industry and cannot be the initial point of leakage of the movie. Thus, the actual infringer is still free.

The objective of this escalation in punishing clearly to deter uploading and illegally sharing copyrighted content. One year of jail is a serious sentence.

You have downloaded

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The site youhavedownloaded is starting to make some buzz.  This is especially true, since Torrent Freak reported that some people at Fox, Google, or NBCU did download copyrighted content (or at least IP addresses registered by these companies).  Of course, with the heated debate about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), this has been used by the opponents.

The site claims to have collected information about downloaded content on BitTorrent for more than 55 million users (or rather 55 million IP addresses).  When you visit the site, it displays the allegedly downloaded content for the currently presented IP address of the visitor.  You can check the records for any IP address.  The site even offers a banner to display the results to the visitors of your site (nice way to make friends :Weary: ).

Is it serious?  The authors announce

Don’t take it seriously

The privacy policy, the contact us page — it’s all a joke. We came up with the idea of building a crawler like this and keeping the maintenance price under $300 a month. There was only one way to prove our theory worked — to implement it in practice. So we did. Now, we find ourselves with a big crawler. We knew what it did but we didn’t know how to use it. So we decided to make a joke out of it. That’s the beauty of jokes — you can make them out of anything.

However, if you have a better idea — don’t hesitate to contact us.

I would love to see a person who would claim that”yes!  the claimed content are true”.  The likelihood of such a person is low.  Serious or not, this site highlights that it is possible to collect such data by using the BitTorrent DHT and trackers.  I am doubtful about the story of large companies downloading copyrighted content.  I would expect that the proxy/firewall of such companies would ban P2P traffic or at least restrict it for trusted users.

Oh, by the way, the site did report that Technicolor did not download copyrighted content. :Angel:

Update 20-dec:  Is it serious?

With the team, we did some experiments, and found at least one positive evidence that the site has true data (using a long-tail type content)/

SF: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

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The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant are a set of seven novels written by Stephen Donaldson.  The heroe is a writer who had leprosy.  Misteriously, he is invocated in a fantasy world, The Land (Le Fief in French).  He is expected to be the Savior.  Unfortunately, Thomas, due to his disease, is extremely cynical and does not believe in the reality of this world.  The key element is the dark psychology of the heroe.

I read the two first novels, and started the third one, and stopped.  I did not become addicted to these stories probably for two reasons.  Th

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Pira(r)te or Art?

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Appreciation of contemporary modern art is always personal and controversial.  Virtual online gallery ART 404 exposes a “piece of art” . whose name is “5 million  dollars 1 Terabyte”.  The opus displays an external, black, shine, one-terabyte hard drive that is claimed to store for 5 million dollars worth of illegaly downloaded pieces of content and software.  The five most costly categories are 133GB of fiction books from 2003 to 2011 ($3,000, 000), 76GB of science text book ($500,000), 26GB of fiction library ($400,000),  39GB of Osprey books ($180,000) and 130GB of PC games from 1979 to 2001 ($150,000).  There are no video and the 124GB of musics are only evaluated $46,000.

We knew that piracy was a black art, but here are we really in the field of Art?  I’d like to hear your opinion.

Marriage and Virtual Property

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If you are a married person, as I am luckily, do you know that you may share with your spouse at least four properties you were not aware of?  URLs, websites, email accounts, and Facebook profiles.  Although they are virtual properties, they are part of your common patrimony.  Furthermore, they may have some monetary value.

As with every good, the problem starts to become complex when there is a dispute.  Are the revenues of Adsense of your personal blog an earning or a profit?  It has its importance when valuing.  How much will your Facebook friends be valued in case of divorce?

Sally Richardson studied this classification in “Classifying Virtual Property in Community Property Regimes: Are My Facebook Friends Considered Earnings, Profits, Increases in Value, or Goodwill?”   She explains the four different applicable cases:

  • Earnings are what a spouse brings by his/her direct effort
  • Profits are what a spouse gets without exerting efforts (for instance rent)
  • Increase of the value property is what a spouse generates due to tangible efforts such as building a new room.
  • Goodwill is what a spouse generates due to intangible skills such as reputation or skill.

Is my URL, eric-diehl.com an earning or a profit?  There is no straightforward answer.  Sally explores the four types of properties and shows the complexity of the issue depending on the context.  It is far too complex to summarize here.

The paper is interesting to read if you are curious.  It clearly shows that our current legal framework is not yet adapted to virtual properties.  I am sure that soon it will have because sooner or later we will see spouses fight over their personal websites, or their common Facebook profile.   If these virtual properties are part of their career (for instance celebrities), then it will be juicy.

Open API to Kinect (2)

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Last year, in November 2010, Microsoft’s Kinect was hacked and its API was illegally published.  In an interesting move, Microsoft decided to make the API of Kinect public.  Not only was it very positive for Microsoft reputation, but it opened the way to thousands of hobbyists to create astonishing applications using the Kinect.

Microsoft continues to exploit the results of this initial hack.  It announced the Kinect Accelerator.  This is a contest where ten startups with the best application using Kinect will be supported.  The application does not need to use the XBox, it must use the Kinect gear.  I believe that it is a smart initiative.  It is better to have hobbyists on your side rather than against you.*

Law 2: Know the asset to protect.   In that case, the most valuable asset was not the Kinect, it was Microsoft’s relationship with the customers.