RIAA vs. The People: 2 Years Later

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EFF:

It’s been two years since the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) started suing music fans who share songs online. Thousands of Americans have been hit by lawsuits, but both peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and the litigation continue unabated.

In a report released Thursday, “RIAA v. The People: Two Years Later,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues that the lawsuits are singling out only a select few fans for retribution, and many of them can’t afford either to settle the case or defend themselves. EFF’s report cites the case of a single mother in Minnesota who faces $500,000 in penalties for her daughter’s alleged downloading, as well as the case of a disabled veteran who was targeted for downloading songs she already owned.

Flexible Working: Half of All Women Want to Pack it All in For An Easier Life

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Management-Issues:

More than half of female workers have already left or are seriously considering escaping conventional nine-to-five working in a bid to invent their own working patterns, according to a new report.


The survey by recruitment and HR consultancy Hudson of more than 1,000 UK employees and 500 employers has found the majority (84 per cent) of professional women believe the nine-to-five routine is being spurned by their gender.


They are instead preferring to follow a career path offering flexibility and professional autonomy rather than fit in with the demands of the corporate world

All the King’s Media

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William Greider:

Heroic truth-tellers in the Watergate saga, the established media are now in disrepute, scandalized by unreliable “news” and over-intimate attachments to powerful court insiders. The major media stood too close to the throne, deferred too eagerly to the king’s twisted version of reality and his lust for war. The institutions of “news” failed democracy on monumental matters. In fact, the contemporary system looks a lot more like the ancien régime than its practitioners realize. Control is top-down and centralized. Information is shaped (and tainted) by the proximity of leading news-gatherers to the royal court and by their great distance from people and ordinary experience.

This is largely why I emailed Tammy Baldwin regarding her vote against free speech. Via Dan

More on Sony’s DRM Phoning Home from Your Computer

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Gizmodo:

First point: Sysinternals discovered that the DRM unisntaller requires you to put in all your specs and then gives you a “unique ID” to download the uninstaller. Then the uninstaller doesn’t run unless you shut down the DRM and you can’t shut down the DRM until you run the uninstaller. Ay! Lucy!

Second point: In an NPR interview:

Thomas Hesse, President of Sony’s Global Digital Business, literally says: “Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?”

So malicious intent and active contempt. Way to keep the faith.

Freedom of Expression on the Internet

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Associated Press:

Twenty-five investment groups, representing about $21 billion in assets in the United States, Europe and Australia, are signatories to a “joint investor statement on freedom of expression and the internet,” an initiative spearheaded by the media watchdog Reporters Without Borders.

The statement comes after several instances in which technology companies have been criticized for cooperating with governments, notably China, in order to secure strong market positions.

“As shareholders, we need to feel confident that our companies are not complicit in human rights abuses, directly or indirectly, and that they’re not collaborating to effectively quell internet traffic, to harm their own good reputations and to reduce their long-term growth opportunities,” said Dawn Wolfe, social research and advocacy analyst for Boston Common Asset Management, one of the participating investment funds.

Although China and other countries have come under fire for limiting what their citizens can see or post on the web, China also is a particularly sought-after market, for the potential its vast population offers.

Microsoft and Google have been accused of helping the government there censor news sites and blogs. And in a recent case, Reporters Without Borders criticized Yahoo for allegedly helping the Chinese government trace the private e-mail account of a Chinese journalist who was later imprisoned for providing state secrets to foreigners. Yahoo has defended its move, saying it is obliged to comply with Chinese regulations.

Beware Your Digital Fingerprint Trail

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Tom Zeller:

According to some technologists, including Dennis M. Kennedy, a lawyer and consultant based in St. Louis, (denniskennedy.com), metadata might include other bits of information like notes and questions rendered as “comments” within a document (“need to be more specific here,” for example, or in the case of my editors, “eh??”), or the deletions and insertions logged by such features as “track changes” in Microsoft Word.
“If you take the time to educate yourself a little and know the issues,” Mr. Kennedy said, “you can avoid problems pretty easily.”
With the Alito memo – which was distributed on a not-for-attribution basis, with no authors named – the D.N.C. was a little sloppy.

Microsoft’s Irish Tax Shelter

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Glenn Simpson:

The citizens of other nations where Microsoft sells its products are less fortunate. Round Island One provides a structure for Microsoft to radically reduce its corporate taxes in much of Europe, and similarly shields billions of dollars from U.S. taxation.

Giant U.S. companies whose products are heavily based on their innovations, such as technology and pharmaceutical firms, increasingly are setting up units in Ireland that route intellectual property and its financial fruits to the low-tax haven — at the expense of the U.S. Treasury.

Much of Round Island’s income is licensing fees from copyrighted software code that originates in the U.S. Some of the rights to these lucrative assets end up in Ireland via complex accounting rules on intellectual property that the Treasury is now seeking to overhaul. The Internal Revenue Service said it is also looking closely at how companies account for such transactions.

In a statement, Microsoft said its European units “report and pay significant amounts of taxes” and that Microsoft “is fully compliant with the tax laws of the United States and all other countries.”

Through a key holding, dubbed Flat Island Co., Round Island licenses rights to Microsoft software throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Thus, Microsoft routes the license sales through Ireland and Round Island pays a total of just under $17 million in taxes to about 20 other governments that represent more than 300 million people.

Microosft is not unique. Many firms route their IP through tax havens such as Ireland, Puerto Rico, Cyprus and others.

This tax saving process occurs in everyday products (for some) as well, such as Pepsi & Coke. Both beverage giants locate their flavor facilities in tax havens.

Your Bed is an Ecosytem

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David Sobotta:

It’s not just your bed, it’s an ecosystem. New research has found that your pillow is home to millions of fungal spores from the bathroom, kitchen and other places where you might not want to rest your head.
It’s well known that few people actually sleep alone: Most beds are home to thousands of microscopic dust mites, which produce so much excrement they can add a pound or two of weight to your mattress every year, by some estimates.