James Hall on 26 February 2009

According to the Local, various members of the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) have taken the stand in the ongoing trial against the Pirate Bay now unfolding in Sweden. At one point, John Kennedy, chairman of the IFPI, was silenced in the middle of his testimony by the judge after Per E. Samuelson, defence attorney for the Pirate Bay, protested that Kennedy had drifted into giving what amounted to a "political speech" on behalf of the recording industry.

Later, Per Sundin, the head of the Swedish wing of Universal Music, claimed that "Sweden has the worst respect for copyright in the world" before, as Neowin had anticipated, he brought up the recent leak of U2's new album, No Line on the Horizon, in the days leading up to its official release. Samuelson challenged him by pointing out that the premature release of the album was due to an industry error (the album was accidentally made available for digital download in Australia prior to its official release date).

Samuelson then asked him exactly what the Pirate Bay had to do with that leak and the copyright infringement that followed. The point is a valid one, as Neowin has noted earlier today. The infringement of copyright is down to individuals using bittorrent clients. The Pirate Bay may provide the torrent files themselves, but these files contain no material that directly infringes copyright.

Sundin's confused reply was, "If we had more resources we would have [gone after individual users]. But we're going after the biggest and baddest villain of the piece and buy viagra now that is The Pirate Bay." This may be the way Sundin and the IFPI view the matter, but it is unlikely that the Pirate Bay personnel on trial will be found guilty of anything.

Besides, up to now, it has been difficult to go after individual file-sharers in Sweden (unlike in the United States), but this situation has changed in the recording industry's favour.

At the same time Sundin was berating the Pirated Bay as "the biggest and baddest villain", the Riksdag (the Swedish parliament) passed a tough new law making it easier for copyright-holders to go after individuals suspected of infringement. Green Party Lage Rahm, one of many on the left who objected to the law, stated, "To stop file sharing a police state is required where all internet traffic is under surveillance. Is it worth it? We think copyright is important, but the problem is that it's not right to criminalize people for what they do for private use."

Rahm also expressed his fear that the new legislation would lead to "blackmail situations" where people accused of infringement would agree to "pay off" the record companies rather than face a trial. This fear contains an implicit reference to what has routinely happened in the United States and is often referred to as "extortion" by legal commentators, noting how the RIAA has systematically used the American legal system to bully individuals into "settling" out of court.

Still, proponents of the new law feel that sufficient safeguards will be in place to stop recording-industry attorneys from simply pushing the "threat" button to bypass the courts in order to use citizens as cash machines, as those critical of the RIAA's activities in America have portrayed the matter.

On a lighter note, and in keeping with the Pirate Bay's correspondence with the recording and film industry, "Kopimi" has sent a "Nigerian 409" email (of sorts) to John Kennedy, chairman of the IFPI, asking for £47,500,000.

Steven Musil CNET News.com

Published: 16 Feb 2009

File-swappers are expected to be keeping their eyes on a court in Sweden this week as a landmark copyright-infringement trial gets underway.

The four men behind the popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay go on trial Monday in Stockholm, accused of helping millions of internet users illegally download protected movies, music, and computer games. The defendants — Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi and Carl Lundström — face up to two years in prison and a fine of 1.2 million kronor (£100,000) if convicted of being an accessory and conspiracy to break Swedish copyright law.

Two of the defendants insisted during a webcast news conference in Stockholm on Sunday that their site was legal and that the trial's outcome would have no impact on the site's ability to operate.

"What are they going to do about it? They have already failed to take down the site once. Let them fail again," Gottfrid Svartholm Warg said, according to highlights of the event printed by TorrentFreak. "It has its own life without us."

The Sweden-based BitTorrent indexing site has defiantly linked to counterfeit copies of films, TV shows, music videos and other content despite Hollywood's requests to remove them. While The Pirate Bay does not host any unauthorised content, the site is accused of facilitating illegal copying by directing its some 22 million users to protected movies and music.

A civil claim brought by a group of media giants is also being heard with the prosecution. The plaintiffs — Warner Bros Entertainment, MGM Pictures, Columbia Pictures Industries, 20th Century Fox Films, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI — seek 120 million kronor in compensation for lost revenues.

The Pirate Bay has already weathered several attempts by the governments of Sweden and the US to shut down the site, but this is likely to be the largest civil challenge the website has ever faced.

"It does not matter if they require several million or one billion. We are not rich and have no money to pay," said Peter Sunde, another defendant. "They won't get a cent."

John Kennedy, chairman of online prescription cialis the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, said in a statement that the case was about protecting the interests of the artists.

"The criminal prosecution of The Pirate Bay is about protecting creators from those who violate their rights and deprive them of their deserved rewards," Kennedy said. "The Pirate Bay has hurt creators of many different kinds of works, from music to film, from books to TV programmes. It has been particularly harmful in distributing copyrighted works prior to their official release. This damages sales of music at the most important time of their lifecycle."

Prosecutors expect the trial to last 13 days.

Contrary to what you may have heard from the RIAA, burning a CD-R or CD-RW is not an activity restricted only to music pirates. In many business situations, the burned CD is the best way to distribute information to a target audience. For communications involving PowerPoint presentations, HTML, PDF forms, Flash animations, or a number of other applications, the portable and durable CD has become a common delivery method.

The compact disk drive auto play feature, common to most operating systems, is a good way to simplify user experience. Auto play is controlled by a simple text-only file called autorun.inf. While there are dozens of software utilities available that will help you create the file, all you really need is a text editor and some basic knowledge.

This How do I… is based on Microsoft Windows, but other operating systems will read the autorun.inf file in a similar fashion.

Solution One: Create autorun.inf

The basic configuration of the autorun.inf states the program to run when the CD is inserted in the drive and the icon to display when the disk is viewed by Windows Explorer or other directory listing software. The text-only file, which resides in the root directory of the CD, should follow this pattern:

[autorun]
open=myprogram.exe
icon=myicon.ico

The icon file should also reside in the root directory of the CD.

Variations

Often the program you want to run will not be located in the root directory of the CD. If that is the case you must include the path:

[autorun]
open=folder1\folder1A\myfile.exe
icon=myicon.ico

Sometimes you may need to pass an argument to the program to be auto played:

[autorun]
open=myprogram.exe /argument
icon=myicon.ico

Not a program

Sending customers, salespeople, investors, and employees presentations, PDF files, and HTML documents requires a slight variation to the basic autorun.inf file and the addition of a DOS batch file to the CD root directory. The autorun.inf file opens a batch file, which then opens the file using the default program designated for that file type. For example:

[autorun]
open=autorun.bat index.htm
icon=myicon.ico

And the autorun.bat file reads:

echo off
@start %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9
@exit

There is a variation on this idea that takes advantage of the ShellExecute command:

[autorun]
ShellExecute=index.htm
cialis without prescription /> icon=training.ico

Using the autorun.inf file to auto play your burned CDs will prevent another headache for your users and increase the likelihood of reaching your target audience. And because it is a simple text file, it can be created with a text editor and your normal disk-burning software.

Solution Two: Create autorun.inf

While creating your autorun.inf file according to Solution One will work for most of your users, it will fail for a small percentage who have issues with the autorun function in their particular installation of Windows. The batch file in the first solution makes no allowances for errors and will merely fail when an error is encountered.

This is where a shell utility can save the day, because these third-party applications contain routines for handling common errors and will complete the autorun process even if an error is encountered. For this example, we’ll use autorun.exe, which can be downloaded from Tarma Software Research. Tarma has made autorun.exe freely available for both personal and commercial use, and there are no requirements for copyright notices, etc.

To use autorun.exe, you make a simple modification to the autorun.inf file by replacing autorun.bat with the .exe file. The basic autorun.inf under this scenario would look like this:

[autorun]
open=autorun.exe index.htm
icon=myicon.ico

The only other requirement is that a copy of the 8KB autorun.exe file be included in the root directory of each burned CD. This application also contains several options and supports an extended autorun.inf structure that provides more flexibility in how you design your CD package.

February 16th, 2009

Posted by Zack Whittaker

After checking Twitter a few moments ago, I was shocked, horrified and appalled at the news that a student from Chicago threatened suicide over the forceful, bullying tactics of major media corporations.

I didn’t think my 200th post on ZDNet would result in me saying this.

I have a fairly controversial opinion when it comes to software piracy, and sharing music and other multimedia online. But considering hundreds of millions of people share and download music every day, the chances of being struck by one of these lawsuits is en par with winning the cialis professional tadalafil lottery or being killed in a nasty milk float accident.

The Recording Industry Association of America (”RIAA” hereon in) with the assistance of other major corporations, including EMI, Warner, Sony BMG, has reported to be bullying students and “innocent people” in a series of attacks in regards to music piracy. Whilst some may say sharing a music file with another person is like walking into a shop and stealing the CD, I would whole-heartedly disagree.

I don’t know a huge amount about the legalities, nor do I understand US law or even the politics too much, so I’ll give this the best go I can. Many of my links direct back here, so please do check out the sourced article.

Thomas Perrelli is the “main guy” who shut down Internet radio by helping to mastermind massive fees imposed on companies such as Pandora.com. Also we have Donald Verrilli, who was one of the main people involved in the attempts of Viacom suing YouTube.

These two men, Perrelli and Verrilli, don’t have a very positive opinion in the online world.

Long story short, according to p2pnet:

“I eventually had a long telephone conversation with girl I mentioned earlier, the one who was threatening to kill herself, and she said she, too, would write something about her experiences. But she changed her mind after her parents agreed to bail her out.

She wouldn’t tell me the price, but she said she now hoped she’d be able to get back to her studies and on with her life.”

There is then the story of Brittany Kruger, who could never be considered a pirate of any kind, shared some music with a few of her friends. This led to the RIAA instigating a lawsuit against her, and described as “being hung out to dry by the labels, with the RIAA fronting for them.”

Her full story can be found a quarter way down the page in blue.

In both my honest, professional opinion, as both a journalist and a student, these vicious, thoughtless, bullying tactics need to stop. Yes I’m sure to some extent this post may not make sense, and you’re probably looking for a point. There is my point, America, because students should not be victims of media giants who take advantage of the law.

October 1st, 2008

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

The National Music Publishers’ Association wants to see an increase in the royalty rates paid to its members for songs purchased through online music stores (the association wants the rates raised from 9 cents to 15 cents a track). Apple doesn’t like the sound of this and is willing to shut down iTunes rather than raise the 99 cents a song price or absorb the higher royalty costs. Is this all just hot air, or could Apple really shut down iTunes?

Here’s what Apple said to the Copyright Royalty Board (PDF, page 4):

If iTS were forced simply to absorb any increase in mechanical royalty rate, the result would be to significantly increase the likelihood of the store operating at a financial loss — which is no alternative at all. Apple has repeatedly made clear that it is in this business to make money, and most likely would not continue to operate iTS if it were no longer possible to do so profitably.

Apple doesn’t seem willing to make a compromise there – it’s Apple’s way or iTunes gets the bullet. But how likely is it that Apple would pull the plug on iTunes?

Note: Let’s ignore for now the side argument of the dangers of letting one outlet grab too much of the market share and be allowed to dominate the discussion …

How likely? Highly unlikely. iTunes accounts for some 85% of the digital music sold, so that’s not something that Apple is going to give up without a fight. Also, the tie between iTunes and the iPod is strong, and there’s little doubt that one appeal of the iPod is how easy it is to buy music for it through iTunes (Apple would also be handing all those customers over to the likes of Amazon). On top of that, Apple is unlikely to want to bring upon itself the wrath of disgruntled customers (imagine the screams if Apple pulled the plug on the DRM servers …). On the other side, you have the music industry. No one here will want to see 85% of digital sales evaporate.

Number crunching: Let’s put the numbers into perspective. Out of ever dollar collected by Apple, 70 cents goes to the record company, out of which 9 cents goes to the copyright holder.

Put simply, Apple’s statement is full of puff, and a deal is certain, and it’s likely that royalties won’t increase. In fact, I’d go further to suggest that is this a PR trick by Apple to make the music industry seem grabby (while making Apple seem like buy cialis online the protector of the consumer).