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September 19, 2003
Dear Subscribers:
Important: There's a very sneaky new virus in circulation - posing as an
official Microsoft email about an anti-virus security patch. Please see the
top of "Web News Briefs" below for details.
We rarely
feature the same topic two weeks in a row. But information for families of
file-sharers keeps emerging. Plus, we received an email from a new, 17-year-old
subscriber on this subject, which is affecting some 60 million households
in the US alone, and we think you'll appreciate the perspective it represents.
Here's our lineup for this third week of September:
- Family Tech:
'Mom's afraid we'll get sued' (parental liability and other legal
issues); File-sharing ethics; New technologies coming
- Calling young Web publishers: Childnet Academy opens its doors
- Taking responsibility online: A subscriber responds
- Web News
Briefs: Nasty new virus!; Teen pleads innocent; DVD-copying software
makers sued; E-pharmacy closed; Google reality check; Bangkok's Web blocking
ineffective, study says; China's 30k 'Net nannies'; Must live with parents;
Study on UK parents; Maine a school-laptops model....
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Family Tech: Fresh file-sharing developments for families
- Mom's 'afraid we'll get sued' - subscriber's
daughter
"My mom sent me this newsletter
to read about the RIAA thing because I'm an avid user of Kazaa," 17-year-old
Sandy emailed us from New Jersey last weekend, explaining that her mother
is "afraid we'll get sued." The number of songs Sandy told us she has
on her hard drive isn't even close to the 1,000+ collections being targeted
by the Recording Industry Association of America, according to media reports.
But that's little comfort to file-sharers these days. Here's the rest
of Sandy's email (which we suspect is fairly representative - see "Steal
this Music?", a New
York Times sampler of file-sharers' views):
"I have a question or two and a couple comments,"
Sandy wrote. "If you aren't sharing your music with other users, will
they/can they find you? If you download the music and put it in a folder
in which Kazaa is not related, will they still be able to find you and
is that not against your legal right to privacy? I think these lawsuits
are pretty bogus. This won't stop people from file-sharing. It will only
cause people to go to a different source. There are other music downloading
programs and more will spring up. Then they have CD ripping software (software
that takes the content from the CD and makes it into useable files.) Will
they start saying that is wrong? As long as there are CD burners, there
will be people who will 'dodge the system.'... But it really doesn't matter
what I say or what I do because I'm not old enough to vote for it. It's
just ludicrous.... Thank you and hopefully this issue will get resolved
without a lot of extremely upset people."
In response:
The RIAA doesn't make its investigative methods
public, but among other things it reportedly uses the file-sharing networks'
(Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster, etc. - not just Kazaa) own software to find
people who are sharing large numbers of music files on their hard drives
- the way any file-sharer would find the large collections. The RIAA takes
the IP addresses and screennames associated with those collections and
subpoenas Internet service providers for the people who use those screennames
and addresses (see the Electronic
Frontier Foundation's subpoena database).
There are other methods copyright-theft investigators
use. For example, BayTSP - one of the bigger cyberdetective agencies being
hired by record and film companies to ferret out "pirates," according
to the BBC
- uses "spider" technology to crawl "all major peer-to-peer networks,"
65,000 newsgroups, FTP sites, Internet Relay Chat channels, and auction
and retail sites. BayTSP told the BBC its technology identifies the username,
the software being used, and the related IP address.
Among the estimated 60 million Americans engaged
in file-sharing (at least half of whom are reportedly teenagers), the
file-swapper most vulnerable to lawsuits at the moment are those making
large music collections available to the public, many news reports say.
That would be people who are telling the Kazaa, Limewire, Piolet, etc.
software on their PCs that their music folder can be shared - or they're
using services whose software automatically makes their music files publicly
available without their knowledge, if such exists (we're hearing reports
of sued people saying they weren't aware they were sharing files). [At
least 53 file-sharing services have emerged since Napster's demise, many
of them claiming to be improvements on Kazaa - see AfterNapster.com's
directory at least for those 53 services.]
The EFF's
"How Not To Get Sued By The RIAA For File-Sharing" is a meaty resource
with detailed recommendations and links to pages at Grokster, Kazaa, iMesh,
and other P2P services with instructions on how to disable the public
sharing of files.
Other legal questions in the media this week:
- Parental liability
The advice on this is all over the map. The
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer quotes legal experts as saying the RIAA "may
have a hard time convincing courts that parents are liable for file-sharing
by their underage children." But that's if the case is not settled
out of court (and one legal expert quoted said he would probably settle
quickly). If such a suit were to go to court, the RIAA would likely
prevail but for damages would "have to prove that the parent could
have controlled or stopped the child's behavior but failed to do so"
- something not easy to do. Another legal expert with the Electronic
Frontier Foundation said that copyright infringement
cases levied against parents for something their child did are rare
- largely untested in the courts. It would not be fun to be the guinea
pig, though. According to a legal source in the New
York Times, "juries would be told they could consider the deterrent
effect of a large award." The Times piece agrees that "parental liability
for a minor's use of the family computer is more complicated than
a straightforward case against an adult." But, practically speaking,
"in most states, an award against a child must be paid by the parent"
- e.g., when a child was driving a parent's car.
Here's a CNET interview with RIAA chief Cary Sherman, in which Mr.
Sherman mentions the RIAA will be "filing another round of lawsuits
next month."
- ISPs' responses to RIAA subpoenas
Two ISPs were in the news this week for their
responses to the RIAA's subpoenas. SBC Communications "has emerged
as the only major Internet service provider that has so far refused
to identify computer users whom the [RIAA] suspects of copyright infringement,"
the New
York Times reported. And lively courtroom arguments were heard
this week in Verizon's appeal of last January's lower-court decision
that opened the subpoena floodgates, the Washington
Post reported. The decision required the giant ISP to hand over
the names of its customers to the RIAA. So far, BellSouth, Comcast,
EarthLink, and Time Warner Cable, as well as Verizon, have all complied
with the some 1,500 subpoenas the RIAA has issued since July. Later
this week, Sen. Sam Brownback (R) of Kansas introduced a bill to limit
the RIAA's subpoena powers, the Wichita
Eagle reported. Here are bigger-picture pieces from USAToday.com and the Washington Post about file-sharing discussion
on Capitol Hill.
- RIAA's 'amnesty' offer
There seems to be no confusion here. "Don't
take it," says the attorney for the group of California consumers
suing the RIAA for deceptive business practice in its amnesty ("Clean
Slate") program in a PC
World article. There is virtually no benefit to a consumer who
takes the amnesty offer, it says - only a promise that the RIAA won't
cooperate in any lawsuit brought against the taker. The attorney,
Ira Rothken, added that the amnesty document contains no release of
claims or promise not to sue, and - anyway - the RIAA itself doesn't
own the copyrights the consumer supposedly stole; its members (record
companies) do.
- File-sharing and 'the new ethics'
No medium has ever demanded more clear thinking
of its users than the Internet - or made it harder for them. There seem
to be two reasons for that: 1) the sheer volume of information, entertainment,
communications, etc. it provides, and 2) the level and freedom of access
(convenience + anonymity) it enables.
Besides what the Internet enables and presents,
look at the context: the cut 'n' paste society we live in, as the New
York Times puts it, in "Beyond
File- Sharing, a Nation of Copiers," an article positioned, we noted
with interest, in the paper's "Fashion & Style" section.
The Internet pulls everything out of moral context,
the Times quotes Neal Gabler, author of "Life the Movie," as saying. In
fact, it creates a "new morality" which says, "as long as you can get
it, it doesn't matter how" and which makes copies "cooler" than originals.
As if to confirm his comment, a study about file-sharing at US universities
was released this week, showing that almost 66% of students would download
pirated software, and more than 40% of their professors say it's ok to
swap software to cut costs, CNET
reports.
The Times article leads with the latest study
on cheating on US campuses, which found it is spreading "almost like file-sharing."
Rutgers University Prof. Donald McCabe, who conducts the study annually,
found this more striking than the 38% of undergraduates who do cut 'n'
paste Internet plagiarism: 44% "said they considered this sampling no
big deal. Because the Internet makes it easy to copy information, he said,
'it's made it much more tempting'."
There never was a better time for parents, educators,
and kids to tackle the subject of critical thinking together. Walnut Creek,
Calif., middle school teacher Valerie Kriger invited her students to think
out loud together about file-sharing, the New
York Times reports. One thing is clear from the discussion: there
is no leap for these young people as they apply their moral reasoning
to online behavior. Technology is not a barrier, the Internet is just
part of life - the very real contribution they can bring to any family
or classroom discussion.
- Beyond file-sharing tech: Alternatives, future
forms
New headaches for the RIAA are in the works, of
course. "Hundreds of software developers are racing to create new systems,
or modify existing ones, to let people continue to swap music - hidden
from the prying eyes of the Recording Industry Association of America,
or from any other investigators," the New
York Times reports. For example, the Wall Street Journal reports that Niklas Zennstrom,
co-creator of Kazaa, is now offering ISPs "PeerCache." It "lets the ISP's
users download commonly shared files from the ISP itself, rather than
over the Internet from another user's hard drive" (won't the RIAA then
be subpoenaing ISPs?).
But it's fascinating to look beyond the whole
file-sharing paradigm. There could soon be something perfectly legal that's
even better for the millions of people who love easy access to all kinds
of music. A commentary in the New
York Times puts forth the sort of "whole new business model" called
for in this paradigm shift many entertainment pundits say we're experiencing.
Picture this: music companies and the supporting industry providing attractively
priced, easy-to-use, "full access to the hundreds of thousands of songs
available to them," writes tech-in-society author Don Tapscott. "Consumers
could still ask for song titles or artists, as they do now on KaZaA. But
they could also, for example, request rock 'n' roll tunes that appeared
for more than three weeks in Billboard's Top 10 during the 1960's. Or
ask for early 1990's guitarists that sound like Eric Clapton, or new artists
similar in style to Alanis Morissette. Requests could be intricate, like
asking for music subsequently recorded by the original members of the
Lovin' Spoonful. Or they could be simple, like requesting light jazz for
dinner-party background music. The system would be interactive and could
learn each user's tastes. As listeners voted thumbs up or down to tunes
(should they choose to), the service would amend their personal libraries
accordingly. If it worked, it would be as if we each had our own private
satellite radio channels - customizable collections of tunes for hundreds
of millions of audiences of one." Watch out, Kazaa, this could supersede
you! It's being seriously discussed by forward-thinking members of the
music industry, e.g. at Pholist.org, according to the Times.
* * * *
Calling young Web publishers!
The brand-new Cable
& Wireless Childnet Academy is now accepting entries from Web site developers
18 and under for its annual competition. After the application deadline (next
January 5), 30 of the world's best young Web creators will be selected to
travel to London and attend the academy, April 10-17, 2004.
That week, the winners "will be given exclusive access
to a team of Internet experts and mentors drawn from the world of education,
business and the public and voluntary sectors. Participants will also be given
the chance to learn from previous [Childnet Award] winners." The earlier version
of the Academy, the Cable & Wireless Childnet Awards, included sites developed
by educators and nonprofit organizations as well; youth is the Academy's focus.
The categories of winning Web sites are the same: individual, school, nonprofit,
and "New to the Net." Here's the Academy's "How
to Enter" page.
* * * *
Taking responsibility online: A subscriber responds
In response to Will's comment last
week about people needing to take responsibility for their online behavior,
Cynthia in Kansas emailed us:
"Kudos to the brave writer who called for taking personal
responsibility online! I would go one step further and add this bit of wisdom
that has served me well for half a century: "When faced with a choice, always
do the hardest thing for you. It is easier in the long run." Extend personal
responsibility to all areas of our lives. Own your mistakes. You will have
to live with the consequences anyway."
We appreciate readers' emails on any subject, anytime. Send them to feedback@netfamilynews.org.
* * * *
Web News Briefs
- 'Microsoft patch virus'!
Tell your family to be on the alert - we've already
received this nasty email posing as an official Microsoft remedy for viruses
and worms. "The W32.Swen.A@mm or W32.Gibe.B@mm (Swen/Gibe) virus couldn't
have come at a worst time for Microsoft and computer users in general
- now that software patches to fix buggy code has slowly crept into the
public lexicon," Internet
News reports. Computer security experts are calling it "highly virulent."
Definitely don't click on any files sent via email with a ".exe" extension,
and experts are advising people not to use instant-messaging or file-sharing
software while the virus is circulating. Here's the page about this virus
and the "patch" for it at Microsoft's Web site. "Anti-virus vendors,
including McAfee,
Sophos,
Symantec,
Trend
Micro, and F-Secure
have all updated IDE files to thwart the spread of the worm," according
to Internet News.
- Teen charged as worm writer pleads innocent
Eighteen-year-old Jeffrey Parson of Hopkins, Minn., who was charged with
infecting more than 7,000 computers with a variant of the Blaster worm,
pleaded not guilty this week, the Associated
Press reports. His trial has been set for mid-November. He has been
placed under home detention but is allowed to attend school.
- Film companies sue DVD-copying software makers
Paramount Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox are
suing a "handful of small software companies" for selling software that
makes it easy to copy DVDs, CNET
reports. "Hollywood executives fear that such software will help push
them into the same cycle of piracy and falling revenues that the music
industry is now facing." This is the second case focusing on DVD-copying
software. An initial ruling is expected any day now on the first such
lawsuit, filed last year, in which a coalition of Hollywood studios sued
321 Studios, "creator of DVD X Copy and the leader in the DVD backup software
market."
- Online pharmacy closed
A neighborhood pharmacy in Dubuque, Iowa, was
shut down by state and federal authorities because it "filled thousands
of illegal Internet orders for powerful prescription medications," the
Des
Moines register reports. In what regulators see as a growing problem,
the drugstore was allegedly working with a Virgin Islands Web company,
Buymeds.com, to sell narcotic painkillers, weight- loss stimulants, and
other drugs without prescriptions. Our thanks to BNA Internet Law
for pointing this news out.
- Google reality check
Google's popularity and usefulness are not in
dispute. But it's also useful to remember that - even with the humongous
number of Web pages the No. 1 search engine indexes (it claims 3.3 billion+)
- that's only a little more than one- third of the Web's 9 million pages,
The Register
reports. "Google is remarkable for many reasons, not least among them
being its ability to compel its most fervent admirers to lose their minds,"
says the writer, quoting another commentator calling Google "the world's
first pop database." In other words, there's a great deal of valuable
information on the Web that Google can't turn up. "The most valuable collections
limit their access, for very good economic reasons: they can't afford
not to. The best collections are Web-accessible, after a fashion. For
example, San Francisco Library's public collections are one of the Web's
treasures - and accessible to any visitor who takes time to pick up a
Library card - but beyond the [Web] crawlers [like Google's]. They represent
the tip of the iceberg of the Internet that Google can't see - but that
the rest of us can enjoy."
In "Net
struggles with data overload", the BBC describes a different sort
of limitation for certain Web users (mostly scientists): the low speed
of data transfer the Internet and its transmission protocol, TCP, allow.
- Thai government's Web blocking ineffective: Study
Researchers at Thailand's Chulalongkorn University
found that it's "impossible" for the Thai government to block pornographic
Web sites effectively because they can easily change their domain names
(Web addresses), and innocuous sites that get by the filters can link
to them. According to the Bangkok
Post, the study tracked 1,000 porn sites in both Thai and English,
finding that "643 sites are active and accessible from Thailand." Among
many recommendations, the researchers suggested the government use a Web
rating system. "Apart from educating young people and their parents and
seeking greater responsibility from the business sector, the researchers
proposed that Web sites should be rated in one of three categories: forbidden,
restricted to adults and unlimited access," the Post reports. Our thanks
again to BNA Internet Law for pointing
this news out.
- China's 30,000 'Net nannies'
The Chinese government employs 30,000 people to
monitor China's some 60 million Internet users, eMarketer
reports. The source of these figures, Reporters Without Borders, also
estimates that "more people are in prison in China for expressing their
views on the Internet than in any other country in the world." The government's
newest worry is Net-connected mobile phones. China has 240 million mobile
phone subscribers, eMarketer adds. BNA
Internet Law also brought this item to our attention.
- Must live with parents
We couldn't resist this one: A 22-year-old Californian
who allegedly hacked into the New York Times's computer network was allowed
to remain free on bail terms that he live with his parents and limit his
Net use to email, job searching, and educational purposes. Tough terms!
But seriously, as the offense was, Reuters
cites an FBI statement saying the hacker, Adrian Lamo, stated in a computer
security Web site that "he had broken in to the New York Times network
and described in detail how he carried out the intrusion." The FBI reportedly
also found evidence in print and on the Web that Lamo had hacked into
the networks of other large corporations, including Microsoft, Cingular,
and Yahoo.
- UK parents need clues: Study
In its report on a recent survey of UK parents
about online kids, the BBC
highlighted two interesting findings: "Many [parents] think [the Internet's]
safe because the children seem to know so much about it" and "they fear
admitting they are ignorant about the Net because they do not want to
appear 'uncool' to their children." According to The
Register's coverage of the survey, more than a third of parents said
they've been concerned about what their children encounter online, more
than half "haven't the foggiest idea what their kids are up to online,"
half are so concerned they sit with their kids while they're online, and
40% don't know where to go for online-safety information. The survey was
commissioned by British cable company Telewest, which, post-survey, will
be working with Childnet International to educated parents among its customers.
- Laptops in school: The Maine model
It looks like Maine's school laptop program has
become a model. New Hampshire will be following suit this school year.
The latter's governor, Craig Benson, recently announced that "19 school
districts are being invited to submit proposals, and up to five of them
will be chosen to get laptops and wireless connections for their seventh-graders
and their teachers," the Associated
Press reports. The winners, which have to show "a passion and commitment
to using the laptops in innovative ways," will be announced in November
and the laptops will be distributed in January. Here's MaineToday.com's
in-depth report on that state's pioneering laptop program.
* * * *
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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!
Sincerely,
Anne Collier, Editor
Net Family News
