Entries Tagged "copyright"

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Ebook Fraud

Interesting post—and discussion—on Making Light about ebook fraud. Currently there are two types of fraud. The first is content farming, discussed in these two interesting blog posts. People are creating automatically generated content, web-collected content, or fake content, turning it into a book, and selling it on an ebook site like Amazon.com. Then they use multiple identities to give it good reviews. (If it gets a bad review, the scammer just relists the same content under a new name.) That second blog post contains a screen shot of something called “Autopilot Kindle Cash,” which promises to teach people how to post dozens of ebooks to Amazon.com per day.

The second type of fraud is stealing a book and selling it as an ebook. So someone could scan a real book and sell it on an ebook site, even though he doesn’t own the copyright. It could be a book that isn’t already available as an ebook, or it could be a “low cost” version of a book that is already available. Amazon doesn’t seem particularly motivated to deal with this sort of fraud. And it too is suitable for automation.

Broadly speaking, there’s nothing new here. All complex ecosystems have parasites, and every open communications system we’ve ever built gets overrun by scammers and spammers. Far from making editors superfluous, systems that democratize publishing have an even greater need for editors. The solutions are not new, either: reputation-based systems, trusted recommenders, white lists, takedown notices. Google has implemented a bunch of security countermeasures against content farming; ebook sellers should implement them as well. It’ll be interesting to see what particular sort of mix works in this case.

Posted on April 4, 2011 at 9:18 AM • View Comments

U.S. Strategy to Prevent Leaks is Leaked

As the article says, it doesn’t get any more ironic than that.

More importantly, it demonstrates how hard it is to keep secrets in the age of the Internet.

Me:

I think the government is learning what the music and movie industries were forced to learn years ago: it’s easy to copy and distribute digital files. That’s what’s different between the 1970s and today. Amassing and releasing that many documents was hard in the paper and photocopier era; it’s trivial in the Internet era. And just as the music and movie industries are going to have to change their business models for the Internet era, governments are going to have to change their secrecy models. I don’t know what those new models will be, but they will be different.

The more I think about it, the more I see this as yet another example of the Internet making information available. It’s done that to the music and movie industry. It’s done that to corporations and other organizations. And it’s doing that to government as well. This is the world we live in; the sooner the U.S. government realizes its secrecy paradigm has irrevocably changed, the sooner it will figure out how to thrive in this new paradigm.

Shutting WikiLeaks down won’t stop government secrets from leaking any more than shutting Napster down stopped illegal filesharing.

EDITED TO ADD (1/27): The story turned out to be too good to be true; it’s been retracted.

Posted on January 27, 2011 at 6:22 AM • View Comments

Predator Software Pirated?

This isn’t good:

Intelligent Integration Systems (IISi), a small Boston-based software development firm, alleges that their Geospatial Toolkit and Extended SQL Toolkit were pirated by Massachusetts-based Netezza for use by a government client. Subsequent evidence and court proceedings revealed that the “government client” seeking assistance with Predator drones was none other than the Central Intelligence Agency.

IISi is seeking an injunction that would halt the use of their two toolkits by Netezza for three years. Most importantly, IISi alleges in court papers that Netezza used a “hack” version of their software with incomplete targeting functionality in response to rushed CIA deadlines. As a result, Predator drones could be missing their targets by as much as 40 feet.

The obvious joke is that this is what you get when you go with the low bidder, but it doesn’t have to be that way. And there’s nothing special about this being a government procurement; any bespoke IT procurement needs good contractual oversight.

EDITED TO ADD (11/10): Another article.

Posted on October 20, 2010 at 7:21 AM • View Comments

Master HDCP Key Cracked

The master key for the High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection standard—that’s what encrypts digital television between set-top boxes and digital televisions—has been cracked and published. (Intel confirmed that the key is real.) The ramifications are unclear:

But even if the code is real, it might not immediately foster piracy as the cracking of CSS on DVDs did more than a decade ago. Unlike CSS, which could be implemented in software, HDCP requires custom hardware. The threat model for Hollywood, then, isn’t that a hacker could use the master key to generate a DeCSS-like program for HD, but that shady hardware makers, perhaps in China, might eventually create and sell black-market HDCP cards that would allow the free copying of protected high-def content.

Posted on September 17, 2010 at 1:57 PM • View Comments

RIAA Lawsuits May Be Unconstitutional

Harvard law professor Charles Nesson is arguing, in court, that the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 is unconstitutional:

He makes the argument that the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 is very much unconstitutional, in that its hefty fines for copyright infringement (misleadingly called “theft” in the title of the bill) show that the bill is effectively a criminal statute, yet for a civil crime. That’s because it really focuses on punitive damages, rather than making private parties whole again. Even worse, it puts the act of enforcing the criminal statute in the hands of a private body (the RIAA) who uses it for profit motive in being able to get hefty fines.

Imagine a statute which, in the name of deterrence, provides for a $750 fine for each mile-per-hour that a driver exceeds the speed limit, with the fine escalating to $150,000 per mile over the limit if the driver knew he or she was speeding. Imagine that the fines are not publicized, and most drivers do not know they exist. Imagine that enforcement of the fines is put in the hands of a private, self-interested police force, that has no political accountability, that can pursue any defendant it chooses at its own whim, that can accept or reject payoffs in exchange for not prosecuting the tickets, and that pockets for itself all payoffs and fines. Imagine that a significant percentage of these fines were never contested, regardless of whether they had merit, because the individuals being fined have limited financial resources and little idea of whether they can prevail in front of an objective judicial body.

Another news story.

Posted on November 19, 2008 at 1:33 PM • View Comments

Monitoring P2P Networks

Interesting paper: “Challenges and Directions for Monitoring P2P File Sharing Networks or Why My Printer Received a DMCA Takedown Notice“:

Abstract—We reverse engineer copyright enforcement in the popular BitTorrent file sharing network and find that a common approach for identifying infringing users is not conclusive. We describe simple techniques for implicating arbitrary network endpoints in illegal content sharing and demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques experimentally, attracting real DMCA complaints for nonsense devices, e.g., IP printers and a wireless access point. We then step back and evaluate the challenges and possible future directions for pervasive monitoring in P2P file sharing networks.

Webpage on the research.

Posted on August 22, 2008 at 12:08 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.