Darknet

'Prince of Darknet' arrested on explosives charges

The Associated Press interviewed me today about Bruce Forest, perhaps the most colorful character in my book Darknet. Forest was arrested Friday and arrainged today on charges that he set off explosives. He is being held on $2 million bond.

Here's the chapter of the book in which Forest stars.

Mash-ups showcase

I've been nonstop crazy busy for the past two weeks, so only have time to get to this now. One of the coolest events at the South by Southwest Music Festival came on March 15 during a mash-up event sponsored by Outhink and IODA, the Independent Online Distribution Alliance. (By the way, regular readers know that I don't subscribe to the common blogger propensity for ignoring any event older than 24 or 48 hours old. Such is the case here.)

Outhink worked with IODA to persuade five independent record labels to make a music track available for videobloggers to remix into a video mash-up. That is, the song would serve as the soundtrack for a collage of images and video drawn from the public domain and from original footage.

If you're a band, what could be better than having vloggers create free music videos for you? It's a hell of a lot cheaper — and often more interesting — than the six-figure productions charged by professional music video directors.

This, I predict, is going to become a huge phenomenon in the years ahead: musicians and video artisans working in tandem.

Here's the rest of the story: Once we obtained permission from the labels to use their music, I asked a half-dozen leading figures in the videoblogging world to create a mashup. Here are the results, from Steve Garfield, Ryanne Hodson, Josh Leo, Annaliese Rittershaus and myself. Three vloggers chose the same track — all of them are pretty cool.

Track: The Organization (play video here or here | Ourmedia page) (mp3)
Album: Get Firm
Artist: The Herms
Label: Jackpine Social Club
Mashup producer: Josh Leo

Track: The Organization (play video, 640x480) (play video, 320x240 version)
Album: Get Firm
Artist: The Herms
Label: Jackpine Social Club
Mashup producer: Steve Garfield

Track: The Organization (play video)
Album: Get Firm
Artist: The Herms
Label: Jackpine Social Club
Mashup producer: Annaliese Rittershaus

Track: Texas_Snow (play video) (mp3)
Album: The Quiet Vibrationland
Artist: Oranger
Label: Amazing Grease
Mashup producer: Ryanne Hodson

Track: Return of the Champion (play video here or here | Ourmedia page) (mp3)
Label: Survival Guide For The End Of Time
Artist: Heavyweight Dub Champion
Label: Champion Nation
Mashup producer: JD Lasica

Michael Verdi also shot a lot of video footage (scroll down) of the podcast interviews conducted at the event.

Cross-posted to New Media Musings.

The new breed of Web mash-up

Katie Hafner in the New York Times: Wary of a New Web Idea That Rings Old. Excerpt:

Web mash-ups, which have proliferated in recent months, can be made up of two or more sets of data. They are often based on Google Maps or Google Earth, then overlaid, or tagged, with information on the location of just about anything.

Dozens of such stitched-together maps have sprung up on Platial since the site first went up in December. They include a walking map of taco stands in Oakland, Calif.; a tour of cycling spots in Toronto; a guide to famous film locations; and a map of public biodiesel pumps across the nation.

The key to Platial, Ms. Eisnor said, is that it offers "a platform that lets anyone make their own mash-ups," which creates "this social atlas where people can document locations that are important to them." More and more, she said, she is noticing that new Platial users will add 50 to 100 places to the site's existing maps in the first week they discover the site, and often they create their own maps. ...

SXSW videos

South by Southwest Interactive has posted videos of speakers and panels from last week, including Craig Newmark, Henry Rollins and the Darknets panel.

Ian Clarke on Freenet

I wrote about Ian Clarke and his Freenet Project extensively in Darknet — even have the $150 phone bill from the long-distance call from the US to Edinburgh to prove it (where were you, Skype?). Well, Ian has since moved back to LA, where he is guiding Freenet and working as chief scientist for Revver.

I had a great time at SXSW with Ian on my panel, and then hanging out with him and his girlfriend Janie at the EFF party there. Here he discusses Freenet, darknets, Revver and his move back to the States.

Formats: H.264 m4v for iPod; 44.2MB; 7:40; Ourmedia page | watch video; video quality: **** (out of 5)

MPEG-4; 30.9MB; 7:40; 320x240px; Ourmedia page | watch video; video quality: *** (out of 5)

Tags: Ian Clarke, videoblogging, video , journalism, SXSW, SXSW 2006, SXSWi, Freenet, Revver

Cross-posted to Real People Network.

Creative Commons license upheld by court

CNET News.com: Creative Commons license upheld by court.

Taking the copy out of copyright

Two cool events at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford on Wednesday that I wish I could attend:

Taking the Copy Out of Copyright
with Ernest Miller
12:30-1:30 PM
Room 95

Hate Speech and the Internet:
A Discussion with Ann Brick of the ACLU and Steven M. Freeman of the ADL
4:30 to 6 PM
Room 180
Stanford Law School

Private torrent communities

Here's an interesting 4-minute video on one offshoot of darknets: Private Torrent Communities and Beyond.

Google to put books online

Missed this news in the San Jose Mercury News the other day: Google to put books online. Complete works to be available, for a fee, in digital form only.

Google is expanding its role in the publishing world from a search engine for books to a distributor making entire books available to read online.

The company launched a new program Friday that allows traditional book publishers in the United States and Britain to sell and set the price for access to full copies of their books, Google spokeswoman Megan Lamb said Monday. Consumers who purchase the access cannot save copies of the books or individual pages to their computers and can view them only through a Web browser.

``We are collaborating with publishers -- in response to demand from them -- to develop a suite of online tools that will enable publishers to experiment with new and innovative ways to generate more book revenue,'' Lamb said in an e-mail.

The new program is open only to U.S. and U.K. publishers at this point.

Several points remained unclear: whether Google would get a cut of the price paid for access to a book; whether customers who purchase access to books see advertising while they read the books; and whether independent authors will also one day sell full access to their books through the service. ...

Proposed NJ laws would chill free speech

Electronic Frontier Foundation:

A diverse coalition of companies, public interest organizations, and legal scholars, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), craigslist, Public Citizen, the US Internet Industry Association (USIIA), the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and Professors Lyrissa C. Barnett Lidsky and Jennifer M. Urban, sent an open letter this week to three New Jersey assemblymen, urging them to withdraw their support from two bills designed to eliminate anonymous online speech.

Assembly bills A1327 and A2623 would require Internet service providers to record users' identities and reveal them in response to any claim of defamation. While aimed at curbing online bad actors, the bills run afoul of the First Amendment -- which protects the right to speak anonymously -- as well as a federal law designed to protect speech in online fora. The bills would require identification of an online poster before the facts were resolved, leading to a flood of unsubstantiated claims designed simply to unmask online speakers.

"Protecting anonymity is vital to maintaining the diversity of viewpoints on the Internet," said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. "Keeping online debates robust enables democracy, even if it allows name-calling and strongly worded opinions about political figures."

See full text of the open letter (PDF).

The Cyberslapp Coalition site is here.

Darknets, the MPAA and digital media

Monday's "The future of darknets" panel at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (here's the Digital Convergence track sessions) in Austin, Texas, was a highlight for many people, gauging by the reaction I've received. One woman came up to me at my book signing immediately afterward and said, "That was the most emotional, passionate panel I've ever seen!"

Credit goes to the audience, which was incredibly engaged and energetic. It turned out to be a sort of digital media revival meeting.

I led things off by showing this four-minute video about darknets, mash-ups and digital culture: All about darknets (11mb, MPEG-4).

We then discussed darknets only peripherally, with the subject turning to piracy and Hollywood's outdated business models. Speakers like Kevin Smokler and Michael Verdi stood up and challenged MPAA spokeswoman Kori Bernards to explain why the movie studios are moving at a glacial pace. Others discussed Hollywood's miserly view of fair use.

I was moderating and couldn't take notes, but Medialoper and Derek Powazek blogged it and Chuck Olsen grabbed some good video. More from Sahu and analoghole.

Here's the hour-long podcast mp3 of the session.

Technorati tags: podcast, videoblogging, personal media, SXSW, SXSW2006, geeks, piracy, copyright, darknets, MPAA

Today's panel on darknets

In a few hours I'll be moderating a panel at South by Southwest Interactive called The future of darknets: Can Hollywood see the light? I came up with the title -- as a call to move the debate beyond the current stalemate -- and asked these panelists to join in the discussion:

- Kori Bernards of the MPAA
- Ian Clarke of the Freenet Project
- Heather Champ, community manager of Flickr
- Mark Ishikawa, president of BayTSP
- Dave Toole, CEO of Outhink

Will post here later with the aftermath. For anyone else blogging, using the tag "darknets" should suffice.

Darknets panel at SXSW

Hope to see many of you at South by Southwest this coming week. I'll be moderating the darknets panel at 11:30 am Monday. (They'll post podcasts of each session some time afterward.) I’m no fan of panels where they line up two Official Spokespersons from one side to face off against two Official Spokespersons from the other side. So you’ll forgive us if we try to move beyond the way this question is usually framed — file-sharing pirates vs. digital anarchists — and tackle more interesting questions, about the limits (if any) of online privacy, whether “lightnet” values can work in a secure private network, whether freenets can serve as a bulkwark against corporate interests, and whether artists can benefit from enclosed or public p2p networks.

We have some cool panelists, including Ian Clarke, in town all the way from Edinburgh, Scotland, and Kori Bernards from the MPAA.

Google subpoenaed by airline

San Jose Mercury News: American Airlines wants Google to reveal the identity of a person who the airline says posted a copyrighted video on Google's video Web site.

Do-it-yourself video mashups

The Associated Press has this terrific article outling the state of visual remixes: Do-it-yourself mashups like a digital blender.

Tom Cruise zaps Oprah Winfrey with the Dark Side of the Force. Bert and Ernie pose as poster boys for gay cowboy love. Sweet, white-haired Mary Worth belts out Black Eyed Peas song lyrics: ``I'm a make, make, make you scream!''

Entertainment from a parallel universe?

Not exactly.

They're alterations of familiar pictures and videos posted on the Web. Artists, often anonymous, snag the images then mix them in a digital blender to create something new -- usually something dripping with irony. The Cruise clip from ``The Oprah Winfrey Show'' was married with ``Star Wars'' effects, Muppet heads were grafted on to the ``Brokeback Mountain'' poster and word balloons from comic strip's Mary Worth were scrubbed and funked up.

They're often called mashups, just like the do-it-yourself songs that combine tracks from separate tunes. And like song mashups, visual remixes are spreading like viruses around Web sites and blogs, those increasingly popular personal online journals.

With software making it easy to slice, dice and subvert everything from movie clips to comic strips, the unauthorized visual remixes could become a significant movement in digital art, a copyright lawyer's worst nightmare or both.

``We're at the start of an age when anyone can produce a short/joke/remix/recut and get it online and out to millions, all within the space of one day sitting at their personal computer,'' said Demis Lyall-Wilson, who created a popular mashup movie trailer recasting ``Sleepless in Seattle'' as a stalker film.

``You just have to submit your link to the right blogs.''

But media executives are not amused. Entertainment companies zealously fight to protect their characters' images -- be it Disney lobbying to extend copyright protections or DC Comics sending a cease-and-desist letter to a New York art dealer last year for showing paintings that cast Batman and Robin as gay.

The ease by which any song, image or film can be pirated in the digital era has not only raised that anxiety, but touched off an intellectual property rights debate that is still playing out in boardrooms and courthouses.

Courts have yet to fully grapple with the legality of visual remixes. Although Batman and ``The Shining'' have copyright protections, the law carves out so-called fair use exceptions for certain reviews or parodies of copyrighted work.

Whether a mashup is fair use depends on a number of factors, including how much gets used and whether the new work is used commercially. Ian C. Ballon, a California-based intellectual property attorney who has represented media companies, said that while legality can only be determined on a case-by-case basis, mashup artists face a real risk of liability.

Like disc jockeys pairing the Beatles with Jay-Z or The Strokes with Christina Aguilera, visual mashup artists exploit odd juxtapositions. An old ``Superfriends'' cartoon is synced with dialogue from the cult slacker movie ``Office Space.'' Scenes from ``The Shining'' are cleverly cut and overdubbed with feel-good narration to make it look like a trailer for a sappy family movie. And is there anything less likely than Mary Worth reciting the lyrics to ``My Humps'' over coffee?

``It was just sort of the absurdity of marrying this very serious serial strip with that song, which is so ridiculous,'' said creator Sue Trowbridge.

Tools of the craft are software like Adobe Systems' Photoshop and Apple Computer's Final Cut Pro instead of paint or clay, but fans say it's still art.

Joey deVilla, a Toronto-based blogger, calls mashups a form of folk art that follows the age-old creative tradition of borrowing from existing works to create something new. Think of Shakespeare adapting old stories with his immortal prose or Roy Lichtenstein taking a page from comic book illustrators for pop art paintings.

``It is the digital-media equivalent of collage, except instead of pasting together pieces of other people's existing work you're pasting together other people's films and music, `` Lyall-Wilson said in an e-mail.

Jason Schultz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation contends that there should be legal protection for mashups such as ``The Shining.'' After all, it's a non-commercial parody that poses no threat to the movie since no one is going to watch the trailer instead of renting the movie.

TV is the fastest-growing target of file sharers

LA Times news service: TV shows are the hottest illegally downloaded files.

Amanda Palmer hardly fits the profile of an Internet outlaw, but her obsession with the ABC show Lost makes this self-described ''bubbly, nutty mum'' the television industry's worst nightmare.

Like thousands of other British fans, the 30-year-old personal assistant can't bear to wait the nine months it can take for new Lost shows to air in England. So, soon after the closing credits roll in America, she downloads each episode off file-sharing networks.

And most alarming to TV industry executives, Palmer admits not a twinge of guilt.

''It's TV, isn't it?'' she said. ``It would probably be different if it was a movie. If it is free on everybody's TV, why worry about it?''

The $60 billion TV industry has a simple answer to Palmer's question: Because the future of free TV may depend on it.

Though still far behind music, television shows represent the fastest-growing type of files downloaded online. As Internet speeds increase and software improves, almost anyone can get high-quality bootlegs of such popular shows as Desperate Housewives, 24 and The O.C. -- minus the commercials that make ''free'' TV free.

As Palmer can attest, piracy has never been easier.

Software such as BitTorrent makes pirated material easy to download, episodic TV ensures a fresh supply of content and portable devices such as Apple's iPod create an appetite for video.

'In the same way that the original Napster was synonymous in the minds of virtually everyone who used it with free music, today if you say `BitTorrent,' they're thinking television,'' said Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne, a research firm that tracks online traffic. ``Even people who are not eye-patch wearing pirates think nothing of grabbing a show from BitTorrent.''

In fact, some people now use file-sharing as a source of on-demand programming, outpacing the industry's efforts to set up their own pay-for-view services. Instead of programming a VCR or digital video recorder to record the latest episode of FX's Nip/Tuck, these users simply download it the next day.

Clicking the mouse instead of the remote has dramatic implications for the TV industry.

Producers of popular programs often take in as much as a third of their revenue from foreign sales -- a pot of money that presumably would evaporate if overseas downloading catches on. In addition, producers also rely heavily on the profits that flow from the DVD compilations of their biggest hits. ...

Craigslist and the free flow of information

Just catching up on Sunday's NY Times article on Craigslist: The Ads Discriminate, but Does the Web? Excerpt:

If this newspaper were to publish a classified advertisement for an apartment rental that said, say, "African Americans and Arabians tend to clash with me so that won't work out," it would be liable for housing discrimination under the federal Fair Housing Act.

Yet Craigslist.org, the enormous online forum, posted that very ad in July, and most legal experts say, as the law stands today, Craigslist bears no responsibility for it.

That is the result of a social bargain made 10 years ago, meant to nurture what was then a strange and nascent thing called the Internet. A part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 said that online companies are not liable for transmitting unlawful materials supplied by others.

Now that the Internet is more mature, some legal experts say, it may be time to re-examine that bargain, and to ask some fundamental questions. Are online companies common carriers, like the phone company or FedEx, and so not responsible for the content of what they transmit? Or are they like newspapers and magazines, which are held accountable for publishing advertising they had no part in creating?

Does it make sense to allow lawsuits against this newspaper for the letters to the editor in this section but not for postings from readers on the paper's Web site?

A lawsuit against Craigslist filed by a Chicago fair-housing group last month, over the "clash with me" ad and more than 100 others, asks those questions.

Court decisions so far have almost universally rejected claims against online companies that publish others' speech. Internet companies have been held immune from suits for libel, invasion of privacy, fraud, breach of contract and housing discrimination.

That means Amazon cannot be sued for its users' millions of reviews of the books and other products it sells. America Online is not responsible for the six million new entries posted on its message boards each month. EBay is not liable for damaging statements among the more than 2.4 billion feedback comments its members have posted. And search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo do not have to worry about the billions of Web pages they make available to their users. ...

Exactly. Sites like Craigslist, Ourmedia, Amazon, eBay and thousands of others could not exist in their present forms if the (absurdly named) Communications Decency Act was not the law. We'd all have to lay off developers and hire attorneys.

Jim Buckmaster, the chief executive of Craigslists, said imposing liability on the site for its users' postings would ruin it.

"Craigslist is in the business of placing services and tools in the hands of the consumer, knowing that the vast majority will use them responsibly, and counting on law enforcement to follow up in the few cases where they don't," he said. ...

Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, said that imposing liability on Craigslist would be a terrible idea; the burdens on the company would be too huge, and the impact would be devastating.

"One of the great advantages of the Internet is that you can have people who create really great products on a shoestring," he said. "If Craigslist were liable, they would really have shut down that part of the site."

But others argue that the unfettered days of the Web should be over. "The Internet has now matured to the point that we are beginning to see that the ordinary rules of law that govern our lives in physical space should also govern our lives in cyberspace," said Rodney A. Smolla, the dean of the University of Richmond School of Law and the author of "Free Speech in an Open Society."

"We understand the potential for harm in Internet communications," Mr. Smolla said. "We understand child pornography. We've seen the Internet as a tool for terrorism. We've seen the Internet as a libel-free fire zone. That will act as a push toward a more measured form of immunity." ...

I can only assume that Mr. Smolla knows what he's talking about -- and places very little value in the free flow of information on the Internet. Thankfully, his is not a majority view.

Internet freedoms come of age

Becky Hogge, managing editor of openDemocracy.net, at AlterNet: Internet freedoms come of age. As government entities around the world discuss what limits to put on the internet, it's time to call freedom of information what it is: a basic human right.

Feds query labels about online music prices

MSNBC.com: Feds query labels about online music prices. The U.S. Justice Department has launched an inquiry into possible price fixing in the burgeoning online music industry.

Senate bill aims to prevent blocked access to Internet

NY Times: Senate Bill to Address Fears of Blocked Access to Net. "Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, will introduce new legislation today that would prohibit Internet network operators from charging companies for faster delivery of their content to consumers or favoring some content providers over others."

Push to create standards for documents

Friday NY Times: Push to Create Standards for Documents.

With government records, reports and documents increasingly being created and stored in digital form, there is a software threat to electronic access to government information and archives. The problem is that public information can be locked in proprietary software whose document formats become obsolete or cannot be read by people using software from another company.

To cope with the problem, 30 companies, trade groups, academic institutions and professional organizations are announcing today the formation of the OpenDocument Format Alliance, which will promote the adoption of open technology standards by governments. ...

CC's new approach to copyright

David Kushner in IEEE Spectrum: Uncommon Law. Lawrence Lessig has pioneered a new approach to copyright. Excerpt:

Engineers, of course, benefit from access to lots of great information and instructional stuff about what their engineering technology can do. And increasingly, they benefit from spaces that encourage a collaborative education around this stuff, such as Wikipedia. We provide framework licenses so you know that when you contribute to an ongoing educational process, the work will continue to be made available to others; it doesn't get locked up and taken away from you. It encourages those who spend an extraordinary amount of their lives building these common projects, like Wikipedia, in just the way the free software and open-source software movements have done with software.

We're not in the business of proselytizing, in the sense of telling people what they ought to be doing. But we did find that, especially in the context of science and engineering and academics, most people build upon and depend upon access to what we call "the commons," as well as build upon and depend upon access to proprietary [material]. You need a healthy ecology of both for the best to be produced, and if you don't have the commons, and you don't have any proprietary stuff, then obviously you're worse off.