They asked a court for the contact information of a huge number of Tek Savvy customers, and will now at least threaten them. we don't hear about any cases involving Bell or Rogers, which suggests that either they didn't ask them for customer listts or that the monopoly players rolled over quietly.
Were I a monopolist, I'd encourage anything that would cause my competitor's customers to be hurt, in hopes the competitor would be hurt.
They're hoping to get the contact information of Tek Savvy's customers and send them threatening letters. The letters are cheap, and some people will settle out of court on the mere basis of a threat. Actually going to court is unwise, as it costs money.
The Court is familiar with lawsuits like this one. AF Holdings LLC v. Does 1-1058, No. 1:12-cv-48(BAH) (D.D.C. filed January 11, 2012); Discount Video Center,Inc. v. Does 1-5041, No. C11-2694CW(PSG) (N.D. Cal. filed June 3, 2011); K-Beech,Inc. v. John Does 1-85, No. 3:11-cv-469-JAG (E.D. Va. filed July 21, 2011). These lawsuits run a common theme: plaintiff owns a copyright to a pornographic movie; plaintiff sues numerous John Does in a single action for using BitTorrent to pirate the movie; plaintiff subpoenas the ISPs to obtain the identities of these Does; if successful, plaintiff will send out demand letters to the Does; because of embarrassment, many Does will send back a nuisance-value check to the plaintiff. The cost to the plaintiff: a single filing fee, a bit of discovery, and stamps. The rewards: potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. Rarely do these cases reach the merits. The federal courts are not cogs in a plaintiff’s copyright-enforcement business model. The Court will not idly watch what is essentially an extortion scheme, for a case that plaintiff has no intention of bringing to trial. By requiring Malibu to file separate lawsuits for each of the Doe Defendants, Malibu will have to expend additional resources to obtain a nuisance-value settlement — making this type of litigation less profitable. If Malibu desires to vindicate its copyright rights, it must do it the old-fashioned way and earn it.
They've asked for $10,000 per person in punitive damages, twice what the current law allows, so they either to think the old rules apply, or they're just trying to scare people into settling out of court.
Alas, they may just be phasing it out. I tried the for-pay service for a customer of mine and found it lacked tables, which was what the customer wanted it for. and, of course, I couldn't offer money, because I already had. Not what I'd do with an offering I was planning to keep...
This is a classic disambiguation effort, like figuring out that there is only one family in a postal code with children, and therefor associating my ad-tracking with them in particular. And then selling that information to other vendors.
His committee asked him to write it and then signed off on publication, so he neither blindsided nor upstaged the management.
They changed their minds, and then went for plausible deniability.
We saw this some years ago when NASDAQ started insourcing, after realizing they'd overshot when doing outsourcing. Now it's visible in companies like Emerson and Apple.
Indeed: I can easily notice anything up to about 40 CPS refresh (my grandma had 40 cycle power when I was a kid). I don't "see" anything past 60 CPS, but my eyes do, and get tired.
Interestingly, my newer flatscreens seem better than my old CRT, which had been distinctly better than my old flatties.
It will be interesting to see if this is a measurable effect: it was initially hard to come up with anything other than anecdotal evidence of differing qualities...
You're seeing quality-of-print issues: my typesetter friends sensitized me to things you can't see consciously affecting the reading experience.
This, in part, motivates higher-quality displays like the retina, and subtle things like designing/adjusting the fonts for particular bit-densities in e-ink.
Only a small amount is measurable without brain imaging (:-)). The easily measurable part is reading speed: 30% slower on a good digital screen than on analog paper.
On behalf of Lynn St. Amour, President and CEO, and the Internet Society Board of Trustees:
Emerging reports from various organizations and individuals indicate that international Internet connectivity was shut off in Syria today. The Internet is an open, global medium for communication, idea exchange, empowerment, and innovation. Access to the global Internet is a crucial enabler of human rights.
As with previous actions to block Internet traffic in Egypt and Libya, the effect of cutting off Internet traffic – ceasing the flow of information in and out of the country - is a serious action. It harms not only the citizens of Syria, but also Syria's economy and society at large. The Internet Society stands with other organizations around the world in calling for Internet access to be restored with all due speed and cooperation so that vital services can continue to function and citizens won’t be further impacted.
First and foremost, the Internet Society joins with the rest of the world in its utmost concern about the safety and security of the Syrian people. Previous cases where such actions were deliberately taken have proven not only to be harmful, but to be ineffective. The Internet Society hopes that the volatile situation in Syria will come to a peaceful solution and that the citizens of Syria will soon be able to join the rest of the world in having their voices heard online.
Why Liability Is Limited: A Primer on New Copyright Damages as File Sharing Lawsuits Head To Canada
Wednesday November 28, 2012
Over the past couple of days, there have been multiple reports about the return of file sharing lawsuits to Canada, with fears that thousands of Canadians could be targeted. While it is possible that many will receive demand letters, it is important to note that recent changes to Canadian copyright law limit liability in non-commercial cases to a maximum of $5,000 for all infringement claims. In fact, it is likely that a court would award far less - perhaps as little as $100 - if the case went to court as even the government's FAQ on the recent copyright reform bill provided assurances that Canadians "will not face disproportionate penalties for minor infringements of copyright by distinguishing between commercial and non-commercial infringement."
Every article has the same content, and links back to a post media story. I haven't been able to find a press release, and the case doesn't have a citation, so it looks like a "placed" story, to offset the limits on copyright infringement suits imposed by bill C-11.
This suggests that someone was hired to find a group of downloaders in BC, all using the same large ISP, and went after them. This could possibly work elsewhere, since the two big ISPs are Bell and Rogers, and there are enough customers of each to be consider risking the cost of filing a suit against 10 gadzillion john does, and convincing a court that you're for real. The amount you'll recover is limited, but if you amortize it over enough people, you might make a profit.
It would be better to get the contact details and then send a bill-collector after each of them, as you could probably frighten some of them into buying you off and signing a non-disclosure. That's a well-known trick in the U.S. It's not obvious if it would work in Canada.
Were I the company doing this, I'd want financial guarantees from the companies employing me, and the right to keep all the fines and not remit them to to my clients, the copyright holders. Here too, it's not obvious if a lawyer could do that in Canada...
And in the spirit of "truthyness", they said they didn't spy on the French Government, but instead on the advisers to a candidate during an election which he eventually lost. Just a tiny bit different from spying on the President. Perhaps they were only spying on his political advisers in any case.
Actually, I think it was Francois Hollande spying on Sarco's election campaign (:-))
Shooting down missiles with a missile is easiest when it's heading toward you in a straight line, for a considerable time and for a great distance, as you see with an ICBM. Shooting down something that is following a fairly short arc, hasn't been in the air long and is already close... is way harder.
I was surprised at how well patriot did in the previous war, and rather impressed at iron dome hitting anything at all.
If you RTFA you find out that it was Swedish banks denying purchases of "horror movies, movies with nudity, or sex toys" and trying to shove blame off on "vague rules from Visa and Mastercard".
Oddly enough, contemporary Swedish fundamentalist moralism doesn't seem to include problems with "horror movies, movies with nudity, or sex toys". It may have a real problem with wikileaks, though, comparable to the problem the U.S. (and UK, and, and...) governments have with wikileaks.
Visa and Mastercard have a significant problem with displeasing governments: if you don't forbid them acting in concert to please their home governments, your country gets whatever the U.S wants (as discussed in several other threads in this discussion).
One can set up encrypted email trivially if one wants: see Phil Zimmerman's and Mike Janke's (new) "Silent Circle" offering, which does so for cell phones.
MLS isn't hard to build the infrastructure for, or hard to use, but to understand it well enough to sysadmin takes a week course with tons of exercises, and really makes your head ache. Been there, did that, ran Trusted Solaris at home. That eventually got repackaged into zones, to simplify it into reasoning about separate virtual machines.
I run zones and SE Linux these days, which is a Trusted system with the levels and categories left out for a simple single-level system with pretty reasonable results.
Alas, to get the security I'd want for fairly basic banking services, you're back into writing proof schemas to figure out if you have your MAC access rules right. That's harder than just sysadmining the darned things. Unless your name is Ron Rivest, don't go there (:-))
A recent article in the Communications of the ACM pointed out that the banks have massive expenses securing and paying for failed security in ATM payments, so expect it to be much worse with mobile.
See Simons and Jones, "Internet Voting in the U.S.", CACM October 2012, p 68, "However, banks routinely and quickly replenish funds lost to online fraud in order to maintain public confidence". This was part of a discussion of why voting is claimed to be safe, based on the fallacious assertion that online banking is safe.
Slashdot Mirror
Tek Savvy is doing notice and notice, as per the (new) law, and put one notice on their blog.
Rogers and Bell have been and still are being very close-mouthed about any suits. So far as I know, they do not now and did not in the past do notice-and-notice. In particular I found out about the York University "Norwich Order" against Bell through York and the Slaw legal blog: see http://www.slaw.ca/2009/09/15/york-university-v-bell-canada-enterprises-observations-and-implications-for-future-norwich-jurisprudence/
--dave
Alas, they're making themselves infamous here, not in the eyes of a random Chatham resident...
dave (a former non-random Chatham resident) c-b
# dhcpd --log /dev/null
They asked a court for the contact information of a huge number of Tek Savvy customers, and will now at least threaten them. we don't hear about any cases involving Bell or Rogers, which suggests that either they didn't ask them for customer listts or that the monopoly players rolled over quietly.
Were I a monopolist, I'd encourage anything that would cause my competitor's customers to be hurt, in hopes the competitor would be hurt.
They're hoping to get the contact information of Tek Savvy's customers and send them threatening letters. The letters are cheap, and some people will settle out of court on the mere basis of a threat. Actually going to court is unwise, as it costs money.
At least one U.S. judge thinks it actually is extortion: at http://fightcopyrighttrolls.com/2012/07/04/judge-wright-is-so-right-copyright-trolling-is-essentially-an-extortion-scheme/ Judge Otis D. Wright writes:
They've asked for $10,000 per person in punitive damages, twice what the current law allows, so they either to think the old rules apply, or they're just trying to scare people into settling out of court.
--dave
Alas, they may just be phasing it out. I tried the for-pay service for a customer of mine and found it lacked tables, which was what the customer wanted it for. and, of course, I couldn't offer money, because I already had. Not what I'd do with an offering I was planning to keep...
This is a classic disambiguation effort, like figuring out that there is only one family in a postal code with children, and therefor associating my ad-tracking with them in particular. And then selling that information to other vendors.
His committee asked him to write it and then signed off on publication, so he neither blindsided nor upstaged the management. They changed their minds, and then went for plausible deniability.
This month the lead is Comeback: Why the future of industry is in America
We saw this some years ago when NASDAQ started insourcing, after realizing they'd overshot when doing outsourcing. Now it's visible in companies like Emerson and Apple.
--dave
Indeed: I can easily notice anything up to about 40 CPS refresh (my grandma had 40 cycle power when I was a kid). I don't "see" anything past 60 CPS, but my eyes do, and get tired.
Interestingly, my newer flatscreens seem better than my old CRT, which had been distinctly better than my old flatties.
It will be interesting to see if this is a measurable effect: it was initially hard to come up with anything other than anecdotal evidence of differing qualities...
--dave
You're seeing quality-of-print issues: my typesetter friends sensitized me to things you can't see consciously affecting the reading experience. This, in part, motivates higher-quality displays like the retina, and subtle things like designing/adjusting the fonts for particular bit-densities in e-ink. Only a small amount is measurable without brain imaging (:-)). The easily measurable part is reading speed: 30% slower on a good digital screen than on analog paper.
From their email of 1600 yesterday...
See http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6710/125/
Every article has the same content, and links back to a post media story. I haven't been able to find a press release, and the case doesn't have a citation, so it looks like a "placed" story, to offset the limits on copyright infringement suits imposed by bill C-11.
Generally, one has to commence a suit, then go to court and ask for an order, addressed to a particular ISP, to obtain contact information for specific customers. Otherwise you need an extraordinary remedy, a so-called Norwich order (see Slaw, http://www.slaw.ca/2009/09/15/york-university-v-bell-canada-enterprises-observations-and-implications-for-future-norwich-jurisprudence/)
This suggests that someone was hired to find a group of downloaders in BC, all using the same large ISP, and went after them. This could possibly work elsewhere, since the two big ISPs are Bell and Rogers, and there are enough customers of each to be consider risking the cost of filing a suit against 10 gadzillion john does, and convincing a court that you're for real. The amount you'll recover is limited, but if you amortize it over enough people, you might make a profit.
It would be better to get the contact details and then send a bill-collector after each of them, as you could probably frighten some of them into buying you off and signing a non-disclosure. That's a well-known trick in the U.S. It's not obvious if it would work in Canada.
Were I the company doing this, I'd want financial guarantees from the companies employing me, and the right to keep all the fines and not remit them to to my clients, the copyright holders. Here too, it's not obvious if a lawyer could do that in Canada...
--dave
And in the spirit of "truthyness", they said they didn't spy on the French Government, but instead on the advisers to a candidate during an election which he eventually lost. Just a tiny bit different from spying on the President. Perhaps they were only spying on his political advisers in any case.
Actually, I think it was Francois Hollande spying on Sarco's election campaign (:-))
--dave
Good point! I should have said "old model ICBMS" (:-))
Joke ends, you can laugh now...
Shooting down missiles with a missile is easiest when it's heading toward you in a straight line, for a considerable time and for a great distance, as you see with an ICBM. Shooting down something that is following a fairly short arc, hasn't been in the air long and is already close ... is way harder.
I was surprised at how well patriot did in the previous war, and rather impressed at iron dome hitting anything at all.
--dave
If you RTFA you find out that it was Swedish banks denying purchases of "horror movies, movies with nudity, or sex toys" and trying to shove blame off on "vague rules from Visa and Mastercard".
Oddly enough, contemporary Swedish fundamentalist moralism doesn't seem to include problems with "horror movies, movies with nudity, or sex toys". It may have a real problem with wikileaks, though, comparable to the problem the U.S. (and UK, and, and ...) governments have with wikileaks.
Visa and Mastercard have a significant problem with displeasing governments: if you don't forbid them acting in concert to please their home governments, your country gets whatever the U.S wants (as discussed in several other threads in this discussion).
--dave
Sure, if the incorruptible thing is a universal good (in either the economic or religious sense of "good"). An incorruptible bad would be ... er, bad!
One can set up encrypted email trivially if one wants: see Phil Zimmerman's and Mike Janke's (new) "Silent Circle" offering, which does so for cell phones.
MLS isn't hard to build the infrastructure for, or hard to use, but to understand it well enough to sysadmin takes a week course with tons of exercises, and really makes your head ache. Been there, did that, ran Trusted Solaris at home. That eventually got repackaged into zones, to simplify it into reasoning about separate virtual machines.
I run zones and SE Linux these days, which is a Trusted system with the levels and categories left out for a simple single-level system with pretty reasonable results.
Alas, to get the security I'd want for fairly basic banking services, you're back into writing proof schemas to figure out if you have your MAC access rules right. That's harder than just sysadmining the darned things. Unless your name is Ron Rivest, don't go there (:-))
--dave
That assumes that PCI isn't the standard the banks are using now, and would be capable of cutting their losses (:-))
A recent article in the Communications of the ACM pointed out that the banks have massive expenses securing and paying for failed security in ATM payments, so expect it to be much worse with mobile.
See Simons and Jones, "Internet Voting in the U.S.", CACM October 2012, p 68, "However, banks routinely and quickly replenish funds lost to online fraud in order to maintain public confidence". This was part of a discussion of why voting is claimed to be safe, based on the fallacious assertion that online banking is safe.
--dave