Are You Stealing Intellectual Property?

ACS:Law, a law firm that specialises in protecting the intellectual rights of copyright holders has said it intends to send out 15,000 letters to people suspected of illegally downloading and sharing films and games. According to the BBC these letters include an opportunity to settle out of court for a few hundred pounds rather than be taken to court and risk paying thousands of pounds. As is rightly considered in the report, this sounds a lot less like enforcing the rights of intellectual rights holders and very much like a money-making exercise.

As I have said before, how will or do they know people are illegally sharing files? There is a suggestion in the report that information is gathered using special software that identifies illegal file sharing. I doubt anything like this exists. I suggest the software (if it exists) does one or more of several things. It identifies file sharing software (not in itself illegal). It identifies large file uploads or downloads. Neither is this illegal. It identifies encrypted uploads or downloads. Again, encryption is not, in itself illegal.

The software has not yet been tested in court. I doubt it will ever be. People who have been accused have either paid up and/or consulted a solicitor. None, it appears who have refused to pay have been taken to court, suggesting there is no real evidence.

Should I receive such a communication from ACS:Law or anybody else (and I predict there will be many) who jumps on the bandwagon my responses will be several.

Since I have a laptop and desktop PC, my son plays X-box games online and has a desktop in his room and my daughter has a laptop, my bandwidth usage will be quite high, I assume. So if the suggestion is my high bandwidth usage arouses suspicion of illegal downloads, they will get short shrift from me. If they claim they have acquired my address from my ISP I will want to know on what grounds they obtained a court order to get this information and investigate the possibility of a contravention of the Data Protection act. Because by requesting a court order, they must surely have investigated my internet usage to provide evidence to justify such a request.

I will make it quite clear to them that I cannot pay several hundred pounds to avoid court action, so take me to court where, if they win they will have even less chance of getting the several thousand pounds they are chasing.

And finally, if they do wish to proceed with a legal challenge and I win, in the face of all their 'evidence', the grounds on which I win will open the door for others to appeal their convictions (if they ever get any) and will provide a legal challenge for all other such prosecutions.

They ought also to remember this is Britain, not the US and cases are taken on merit, not money.

We Know Who You Emailed Last Summer.

The government is to push ahead with plans to insist CSP's (Communication Service Providers) keep records of our online communications. This includes social networking sites like Facebook. Hell, it means any company or website that processes any communication online.

The government says it doesn't want to create a single database to hold these records. Just that the CSP's keep records of communications, not their content just a record of who communicated with whom, and that these records will be used for investigating and solving crime. Well, we saw what happened with similar anti-terrorism surveillance laws where councils were spying on people to see if they were living where they said and to catch dog owners not cleaning up their mess.

If you ask me, this isn't about crime in general. It is about specifically targeting illegal downloader's and if that is the case then they should come right out and say so. What other reason could there be? If the content of a communication won't be kept, what good is knowing a communication took place? The only reason I can think of is proving a communication with a known download site.

The other side of the coin, in these circumstances is supposing I email somebody and this communication is held for 2 years. What if some months later the person I emailed is arrested on a serious criminal charge? There is no record that I merely responded to an advert for a ladder for sale, only that the communication took place. So will that communication be ignored, making the law ineffective and irrelevant or will we see thousands of innocent people targeted merely because they sent an email?

Where is the evidence that this will have any effect on crime? This is just another draconian law designed to look like protection for the population in general but in reality will be restrictive and dangerous for the ordinary citizen whose worse crime is putting their bin out on the wrong day.

Cloud Computing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing


“The concept, is that vast computing resources will reside somewhere out there in the ether (rather than in your computer room) and we'll connect to them and use them as needed.”

Personally I am of the opinion that this is just another way to get more money from us. Cost of computers is constantly falling, software vendors are extending special offers to buy or upgrade their software. A niche has been seen, a possible multi billion pound (or dollar, if you prefer) niche. No matter what, if ‘cloud computing’ becomes mainstream, that is where the development money will go and licensed software will become obsolete and probably unusable eventually.

Regardless of the reasons vendors and or developers take this tack it takes away our choice. I just had a look at google docs for the first time and I can see me using it sometimes, when convenient and when the work is not critical. I would also point out that google docs have an offline option, which appears to allow google docs to be used offline. Presumably that means they are synchronised (I haven’t tried it yet) and if google or your internet connection goes down, you can still access and work on your docs.

I think in all probability it will be many years before ‘cloud computing’ becomes commonplace. There will probably be several years of licence based applications running alongside ‘cloud computing’ before we see the demise of licensing. But if ‘cloud computing’ becomes popular, then we certainly will see it pushed by the vendors and once there are few alternatives we may well see the end of cheap, maybe even home computing.

Another possible issue is who will supply these applications in the ‘cloud’? Almost certainly, apart from the current software vendors ISP’s will offer ‘cloud computing’ as part of its package. This could result in difficulty leaving an ISP (we all know how difficult it has and still can be to get a MAC number from your ISP) if they withhold your documents or make it difficult to access them. There are many ways such a system could be used to make document retrieval difficult.

Then there is the government. Living in the UK and seeing some of the draconian laws being introduced in the name of security, how long before they (or some future government with few or no scruples- perhaps a Hitler II -) would demand access to everybody’s documents- in the name of ‘security’, of course?

In 1943, IBM's Chairman, Thomas J. Watson, famously said that "the World will only maybe need five computers!" we repeat this and have a little giggle at his lack of foresight. He envisaged these five supercomputers serving the billions of terminals we would have in our homes. It seems his comment, however ridiculed it may be today, may not have been so far from the truth!