After posting this information on ripten, a Dell representative chimed in to say that the lack of a sound card Stereo Mix option was most likely due to an issue with laptops running XP, and that a driver existed to correct the problem. However, it is still not clear whether the driver works for all Dell computers or why the option was disabled in the first place. Nor does it address the possibility that the problem may not be confined to Dell products alone. Naturally, random forum threads do not confirm RIAA involvement with Stereo Mix as a fact—but it does have that slimy, fishy vibe we have come to expect from them. With that having been said, have you experienced similar problems? [ripten]

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I promise not to be too shocked by the results...

In addition, half of this group was happy to share all of their music, though probably more often through BitTorrent than Times Online's "hundreds, or thousands, of songs at any one time" postulation. Another point that's not quite clear is whether or not CD backups were considered to be stolen tracks. If so, these numbers become extremely tough to interpret.

Still, 80% of the music pirates said that they'd pay about £10/month for a subscription service. Now if we could only find a subscription service that offered as many tracks as the entire dark alley of the internet, we'd really have something. [Times Online]

"In the long term, the consumer wants there to be quality premium-produced content, and in order for that to continue to be a viable business, there needs to be significant protection around it." This is the same NBC that was working with AT&T to build a network-wide dragnet for pirated content, so color us totally not surprised. Just don't know why Microsoft would agree to this and give people a reason to avoid Zunes (whether it's a legitimate one or not), when they're already way behind the iPod (which told NBC to take a flying hoo-ha).

Update 2: Saul has since updated the original post with Zune Insider's retort, but he also adds what Microsoft spokesman Adam Sohn told him yesterday when he asked about the copyright stuff:

"I don't think they are wrong, but we are not going to characterize those discussions. We have agreed to work with NBC across a range of topics, and protection of copyrighted material is certainly one of them."

"If you look at studies about MP3 players, especially leading MP3 players and what portion of that content is pirated, and think about how that content gets onto that device, it has to go through a gatekeeping piece of software, which would be a convenient place to put some antipiracy measures. We are financially harmed every day by piracy. It results in us not being able to invest as much money in the next generation of film and TV products."

If they're able to win, they plan to use the money for good, not evil.

We will demand an amount of cash that we feel will be reasonable (Not counting like Ifpi themselves, we actually understand economy a bit more). With the money (when/if we get it) we will start a Danish grant if possible. The grant will give out money to Danish aspiring artists for making music and releasing it for free. And all will be sponsored by Ifpi since they tried to fuck those people over. Poetic justice.

Though the European Parliament has plenty of power, this particular legislation seems to be more for advisory purposes. The BBC says:

The vote has no legal force and leaves national governments free to implement their own anti-piracy plans. But, said the Open Rights Group, it does "signify resistance" among European law makers to the strict measures that nations such as France are implementing.

Cases such as the Jammie Thomas case, which resulted in $222,000 worth of penalties, are based on files being made available in a shared folder in a P2P program such as the now-dead Kazaa. In that case, there was no evidence that any transfers ever took place.

However, while the judge stated that merely making files available is not enough as the basis of a lawsuit, he did say that an "offer to distribute" can be good enough. This probably means that the lawsuits will continue, just with adjusted language and arguments. Now we'll just need to wait and see whether or not the courts see keeping files in a shared directory as an "offer to distribute." And the soap opera continues. [CNET via Broadband Reports]

Adelstein half dodged that with a question: "The problem is, how can you ever tell what's illegal?" Well you can't, not without some serious filtering and snooping by ISPs, and a lot of wrangling over whether uploading or downloading is deemed piracy. And what about telling the difference between illegally sharing a movie from a big studio, and sharing an independently-produced movie designed for P2P sharing? Clearly, the FCC isn't comfortable going all in for content filtering, at least not yet.

We'll just have to watch to see what this implies for the final net neutrality guidelines. [Ars Technica]

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[Wired via Ars Technica]

AT&T has also participated in tests like this one, but is trying to find a way to block pirated content and only allow "legal" content such as NBC's officially delivered shows to make it through the network. Verizon, on the other hand, says they do "not accept the role of network police agency," which means filtering for pirated content is unlikely. Time to sign up for Verizon! [Yahoo]

The whole video is over 60 minutes long—these are just two of the more outrageous minutes with Jim Dedman, from the NDAA, interviewing Deborah Robinson and Frank Walters from the RIAA about the benefits of going SWAT on music pirates. At one point, Walters says the piracy/drug connection can be so bad that you get asked "When you buy a CD, would you like it with or without—the with is enclosing a piece of crack or whatever the case may be."

As a bonus, a local filter would defeat encrypted torrents, since you've gotta decrypt 'em, at which point the filter would kick in. Sherman is a smart cookie though, and knows people aren't just gonna sign up to have their machine lojacked:

"Why would somebody put that on their machine? They wouldn't likely want to do that, they'd do that when it benefits them such as for viruses and so on and so forth...it could be enforced at the modem or put in by the ISP."

So what are they doing? Pushing the PRO-IP Act through Congress that'll increase the statutory damages for compilation albums to a whopping $1.5 million. Yes, if you get busted sharing a soundtrack or compilation album with multiple artists on it, the RIAA wants to count each track as its own album. You know, just for the heck of it.

With statutory damages already so out of the league of the rational and the justifiable, increasing the damages this much might actually happen. I mean, if they could justify $150,000 an album before, is it really such a leap to make that $1.5 million?

The moral of the story? Be careful and don't get busted. [Ars Technica]

To their credit, the MPAA has admitted to the mistake, saying that "We take this error very seriously and have taken strong and immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report." Great, MPAA! Thanks for taking the time to stop vilifying college students as a roving pack of thieves as the RIAA loves to do. Now lets see if it changes your behavior at all, shall we? [Yahoo via Consumerist]

And danger, music fans, the audio quality of pirated music is "usually atrocious." But don't worry, the industry's "offering cool, innovative ways" to get music like "digital album gift cards" and "Christmas-themed ringtones." Jinkies, that's cutting edge. Are they selling Hanukkah MiniDiscs too? [Live Leak via Slashdot]

It is undisputed that Defendant possessed unauthorized copies of Plaintiffs' copyrighted sound recordings on his computer ... Virtually all of the sound recordings on Exhibit B are in the ".mp3" format. ... Defendant admitted that he converted these sound recordings from their original format to the .mp3 format for his and his wife's use.

Content owners can leverage the popularity of new media distribution channels by identifying what content is being shared, viewed, mashed up or accessed. This intelligence enables content owners to make meaningful decisions on what content to allow or disallow on such sites.

As part of her appeal, she filed to have the damages ruled unconstitutional in their heft, given that they cost labels about 70 cents a song. The Copyright Act allows for statutory damages up to $150,000 a song, which the RIAA argued (and the DoJ agrees) don't have to be anywhere near actual damages. If you want the legalese it goes like this:

Statutory damages compensate those wronged in areas in which actual damages are hard to quantify in addition to providing deterrence to those inclined to commit a public wrong.

[G]iven the findings of copyright infringement in this case, the damages awarded under the Copyright Act's statutory damages provision did not violate the Due Process Clause; they were not 'so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense or obviously unreasonable.

The damages—again, over $9000 a song—might be not "obviously unreasonable" but that doesn't mean they're not fucking unreasonable. [Ars, Image via Flickr]

To be fair, this probably has a lot to do with the fact that Vista is a lot harder to pirate than XP, which is pretty much cake to get for free. I mean, what kind of pirate would willfully put up with Windows Genuine Advantage when they could just not worry about it and use XP? But yeah, I'm sure a lot of people are pirating XP for the same reason people are still buying new computers with XP: Vista is still scary. [News.com]

EMI is a business just like any other company, and its new owners must have realized that spending $132 million a year to alienate their customers was providing them with a really poor return on investment. I mean, it's just not good business sense. Will any of the other major labels follow suit? Time will tell, but if they do you can pretty much wave goodbye to the era of the RIAA having influence. A bittersweet victory it would be, as I'd need to find something else to bitch and moan about every day, but it'd be worth it in the end. [Ars Technica]

The toolkit's actually a modified version of xubuntu rolled up with some network monitoring tools like Snort, which "captures detailed information about all traffic flowing across a network" and ntop, which makes pretty graphs from the data produced by Snort.

After you install it, it sets up an Apache Web server that uploads all of the data and graphs to a web page that displays "not only bandwidth usage generated by each user on the network, but also the Internet address of every Web site each user has visited." The kicker is that unless it's properly firewalled, the page is open to anyone and easily Googlable if you know the kit's URL conventions. Yet the MPAA's overview explicitly promises "No privacy issues—the content of traffic is never examined or displayed."

It gets better. The person who installs the toolkit isn't prompted to setup a user/pass to block access to the site, and the default setting is to not log outsider views of the page. Like, say, the MPAA's people. And even with the firewall blocking outsiders, tech-savvy university students can still sneak peaks.

To be fair, the MPAA's Craig Winter emphasizes

It can tell you how much traffic is going back and forth on BitTorrent [a popular file-sharing service], but it can't see what's in those files or what the names of those files are, and it doesn't communicate anything back to the Internet.

Good question. No one knows who he was or what the point of the broadcasts were (it was actually the second of the evening, with the first being a shorter clip of the same video broadcast during the evening news on a different channel). It's not like there was a message really, either. The ramblings are pretty tough to make out, and when you do they don't make a whole lot of sense.

That's not to say that it was brushed off as not that big a deal; the FCC actually launched an investigation trying to figure out just who this Max Headroom character was to no avail.

How exactly did he do it? An article from the November 24, 1987 Chicago Sun-Times explains it thusly:

"It's pretty apparent it was local," said Robert Strutzel, WGN director of engineering. Strutzel explained that the intrusions could have come from a high-rise apartment or a roof between the WGN transmitter on the Northwest Side at 2501 W. Bradley and its antenna atop the Hancock Building.

"It's not the kind of thing that's done by somebody in his basement," Strutzel said. "It's sophisticated microwave equipment at pretty high power levels to overcome our installation. And the room for error is very small."

Commercial-grade equipment of this sort would cost around $25,000 and could be carried in a few suitcases, he said - or the equipment could be rented.

From what I can tell, all it does to determine if something is pirated is to see if it was produced "professionally," which seems as a really crappy litmus test for piracy. I mean, people put professional video online all the time with complete legitimacy. Nonetheless, I'm sure we'll see something like this hitting YouTube sooner rather than later. At which point everyone will head over to DailyMotion or Vimeo or whatever other site will be too lazy to implement this technology. Check the press release after the jump.

Saitama, Japan - October 29, 2007 - KDDI R&D LABS today announced that it has developed a new content protection technology which enables pirated video content detection by distinguishing between the content created by a professional and the content created by an amateur. This technology has been developed in consideration of the situation that while the number of users on video-sharing sites such as YouTube™ is increasing rapidly, copyrighted video clips have been illegally uploaded, e.g. TV programs. Up to now, in order to find pirated video clips on video-sharing sites, a human has to check by visual inspection. Then if pirated videos are found on the sites, copyright holders need to request the video-sharing site operators to delete them, which requires so much labor. Recently some video-sharing site operators implement a pirated video blocker based on fingerprint, which is a set of features for identifying video content. In fingerprinting technology, however, copyright holders have to identify copyrighted videos and provide operators with the copyrighted videos and the necessary information, while video- sharing site operators have to register fingerprints of the copyrighted videos in advance.

Moreover, it is very hard to keep following explosively increasing video clips which are newly uploaded day after day. KDDI R&D LABS' technology focuses on differences between a professional and an amateur in terms of their video capturing devices, their video capturing techniques, their video creation processes, and so on. With KDDI R&D LABS' proprietary technology, visual and audio features which are affected by these differences are analyzed, and then it enables to distinguish between video content created by a professional and video content created by an amateur; a very high distinction rate of 98% is achieved. Using this technology, illegal video clips can be automatically and reliably found on the vast amount of video content, which significantly reduces labor costs for eliminating pirated videos. In addition, since KDDI R&D LABS' technology analyzes features of the content itself, there is no need to register pirated videos in the database beforehand, and furthermore, it is effective for new video clips which have never been uploaded so far. This technology can be implemented as a video content inspection engine, which is installable on video sharing servers. Upon being uploaded, a video clip will be inspected and if it is suspected as a pirated video clip, it will be rejected. This protects copyrights of video content.

The setup would work a lot like GooTube's—the networks would hand over a bank of material that AT&T/Vobile would run traffic on the network against, looking for positive IDs. If it matches the "video DNA" on file, it gets the hammer. Supposedly Vobile's ID tech is tops, at least among "a dozen or so other systems" tested by the MPAA. AT&T's reportedly been testing it since spring, though it'd launch until late 2008 at the earliest.

In order to keep consumers and net neutrality advocates from flipping out, one marketing strategy AT&T might use is to emphasize the filter as a way to catch child porn, since no one can really argue against stopping predators. On the flip side, an effective monitoring program is loaded with business propositions, from helping them net content distribution rights to being able to "offer far more detailed information on [customers'] likes and dislikes, in turn enabling AT&T and its partners to land lucrative deals with advertisers hungry for such data."

I could act all shocked and appalled like Wilson about AT&T being so disinterested in customers' privacy (to put it lightly), but it wouldn't be genuine, and I'd feel dirty in the morning for lying to you. [BusinessWeek via Broadband Reports]

I'm here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I'm not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I'll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won't let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don't have any more time to give and can't bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life's too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.

Her appeal is going to hinge on jury instruction no. 15, which told jurors that she could be found guilty even if it couldn't be proved that anyone actually downloaded the tracks she was sharing. Whether or not just making something available counts as distribution is a murky issue, one that doesn't have a clear precedent.

As Thomas so eloquently explains on her MySpace blog (sigh), her lawyer laid it all on the table in a CNN interview:

During the interview, he was asked what the next step is. I figured he would give the same answer I have given many, many times already in numerous interviews; "we're still strategizing about what our next options are." Standard lawyer speak if you will. But surprise, surprise, my attorney announced, on national television, with the RIAA watching I'm more than certain, we're going to appeal!!! That's right, you read that correctly: WE'RE GOING TO APPEAL!!! I could have kissed Batman when I heard that.

He explained how we're going to take the RIAA's theory of making available and appeal it. He also explained how if we win, this would stop the RIAA dead in their tracks!!! Every single suit they have brought has been based on this making available theory, and if we can win this appeal, they would actually have to prove a file was shared and by someone other than their own licensed agent (read MediaSentry).