Viacom Sues YouTube for $1 Billion!

Today, Viacom announced it would be suing YouTube (recently purchased by Google) for $1 Billion for copyright infringement.  Viacom has claimed that over 160,000 clips of their copyright videos are currently circulating on YouTube and have been accessed over 1.5 Billion times.

Viacom makes up a number of entertainment outlets such as MTV Networks, VH1, CMT: Country Music Television, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central , and Spike TV.

I don’t find this a surprising move and frankly I think this may just be the first of many high-scale lawsuits that YouTube will have to face in the coming months.  Before YouTube was sold, they didn’t have the financial backing to make it worthwhile for companies to sue them.  The money for the companies like Viacom to win just didn’t exist.  Now that Google is the proud owner of YouTube there is a wealth of money waiting to be sued away from YouTube/Google.

Source Story

University Bans Torrent Sites

 Cardiff University’s IT department has recently sent out a warning to all 25,000 students that they would be banning a slue of torrent serving websites.  The list included over 30 torrent sites including many popular ones such as Pirate Bay, Torrentz, and Mininova.

Not long ago the university banned the use of programs such as  Aimster, LimeWire, KaZaA, Mactella, Morpheus, Phex, iMesh, Qtella, Audiogalaxy, SwapNut, NeoModus, XoLoX , BitTorrent, WinMX, Gnutella, Gnotella, BearShare, Gnucleus and GTK-Gnutella.  All of these being popular file-sharing utilities.

Despite these two decisions by the university, I don’t think this will have much of an effect on the amount of filesharing going on at the university.  The fact is a new torrent site goes online everyday and there are numerous internet proxy websites that allow students to bypass the universities block on the banned torrent sites.   I don’t see this affecting the students for longer than 1 week, when the word spreads on how to bypass such blocks.

Source [http://torrentfreak.com/university-bans-bittorrent-sites/]

Interesting List of Oldest .COM Domains

Here is a link to a list of the 100 oldest .com domains on the internet.   I just found it interesting so I thought I would share and thought it might be a good thing to show the class:

http://www.jottings.com/100-oldest-dot-com-domains.htm

Be Careful What You Post on the Internet

Today’s internet is full of options for everybody to write what they think and do, post pictures of what they’ve done and promote themselves in every which way. In a recent report by ABC, they’ve found that employers are not only looking at your resume, but also your internet profiles and blogs.

“I know somebody who didn’t get hired because they were writing in their blog about what they were doing at all hours of the day and night, being out until four in the morning and then having to struggle to get to work,” said Alison Doyle, Skidmore College’s associate director of career services. “The employer found it and that was a flag when it came to hiring.”

The amount of information you can find about someone online now is getting out of hand. Through the use of sites like myspace and facebook and adding in personal blogs, you can find out a whole lot about someone’s life without ever meeting them. All of these avenues of internet posting allow users to post images which in many cases can be damaging and come back to haunt you years from now.

Internet profiles are becoming the new job taboo whereas 10 years ago, it might have been having a tattoo. Career counselors are urging students before they graduate to check their online profiles and make sure that they remove questionable materials and check privacy settings. The worst thing that could happen is to have a random internet profile prevent you from getting a job.

I personally feel that employers should not be using this data and not hunting it down. The resume and interview has long been the standard to decide on whether or not a candidate is worthy of the position and I think it should stay that way.

Full Article

OpenID – It’s Potential Strengths and Flaws

OpenID is the part of the web 2.0 boom happening on the internet. It is a decentralized login system that if adopted by all the major websites would allow for 1 user login for all of the sites. No more remembering what account goes to what site or having to fill in a signup form for every site. With the OpenID system, you create 1 account and use it on all the sites which currently support it.

“So what do I mean when I say ‘decentralized identity’? Basically, you can host your identity on any server that you choose, whether you put up your own or use alternatives like myopenid.com. This means that if you want to keep your information away from individual websites you can use your OpenID account and login safely without giving your information away.”

This may sound great; however what are the issues with a system like this? Well first of all there is the issue of site adoption. Getting websites to use the OpenID system is proving a struggle, but slowly the number of websites supporting the system is growing. I believe they need to make the system easier to integrate with existing sites if they want to get over this hump.

Secondly and more importantly, there is the issue of security. The major issue is that if/when someone figures out how to hack the OpenID system, they not only get access to one website, they get access to every website that supports OpenID using your username. This can prove a serious issue depending on what types of sites adopts the OpenID system.

Overall the system sounds good, but they need to prove that security will not be an issue and until they do, I certainly will not be incorporating the system into any of my sites, nor signing up for a username.

Related Article

The Future of the MP3 Format

In a court decision earlier this month, Microsoft was ordered to pay $1.52 Million Dollars to Alcatel-Lucent for infringement on their MP3 format technology. The decision will do doubt make companies question whether or not they should continue using MP3 format or look into other open-source music compression alternatives.

“Backers of alternative formats have sought for years to replace MP3, which offers relatively lower quality sound than next-generation technologies — including the nominal successor to MP3 itself, MP3Pro. Apple uses the MPEG industry standard, AAC; Microsoft uses its proprietary Windows Media format; and Sony has developed its own, largely ignored flavor. Open-source, royalty-free options, such as Ogg Vorbis, remain dark horse competitors. But none have displaced MP3, the first and most widely adopted format of all.”

The problem with the MP3 format is that it is the technology developed by not one, but two companies. The industry recognized holder of the patent is Fraunhofer/Thomson, but this latest court decision also recognizes Alcatel-Lucent as second patent holder and therefore a company that must also be compensated for the technologies use. Paying two companies for the rights to use the MP3 format, may sway them towards other formats.

The complete article can be viewed here

Canadian music industry wants to reimpose “iPod tax”

 According to a recent article from The Canadian Press, the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) is pushing the Canadian Copyright Board to reimpose an extra fee on the sale of MP3 devices.  This fee would be charged on MP3 player sales and could range from $5 to $75 depending on the size of the player’s harddrive.

The CPCC direcor says:
“We’d all like lots of things to be free. But those who create the music deserve to be compensated. When you go and buy an iPod, the retailer gets paid. So you can’t say that the people who make the music should get a free ride.”

I don’t believe this to be the case though.  The CPCC assumes that all of the MP3 player devices will be loaded with illegally downloaded copies of music.    They don’t account for those who buy MP3s online nor do they account for those who rip songs off their CDs.  Those people are getting taxed for using a player with their own legal music.  This is a case of taxing the masses for the wrong doing of only a specific group.

As the articles says “Brian Gray, an intellectual property lawyer with McCarthy Tetrault, said he doesn’t anticipate the levies will be approved, despite Basskin’s argument. But he said he’s happy to see the issue back before the Copyright Board.”

It’s alright that such topics get raised by government, but I hope that a measure like this doesn’t pass.  Adding a $75 fee to the purchase of some players will no doubt hurt player sales and in no way stop the illegal trade of MP3 songs.  Also in this day and age, you have to expect that Canadian citizens could purchase players online from the US and bypass the extra fees.

Read the full article here