Congress must seem to think that they are on a role when it comes to technology issues; first they wanted to scrutinize the Google/DoubleClick merger, then they took an interest in the iPhone and it’s exclusive contract, and how they’re coming after P2P as a possible threat to national security. However, unlike the first two high profile issues, their current crusade is just stupid; in fact, it’s downright shameful.

What would any rational entity do if they noticed that their sensitive data is being leaked to P2P networks? They would most certainly not do what Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and Representative Tom Davis are currently doing, which is blame the P2P networks for leaking national secrets to potential terrorists. During the hearings, Mark Gorton, the chairman of LimeWire, was actually accused of harming national security by offering his P2P product. Waxman even mentioned that he’s thinking about proposing laws to regulate peer-to-peer file sharing. Oh boy.

According to Ars Technica, Waxman stated that his intent was not to “shutdown P2P networks or bash P2P technology,” but to determine if such applications as Limewire create an “unacceptable risk for consumers, corporations, and government” entities. He went on to say that they conducted a few simple searches with LimeWire, the most popular P2P client, and found “personal bank records and tax forms, attorney-client communications, the corporate strategies of Fortune 500 companies, confidential corporate accounting documents, internal documents from political campaigns, government emergency response plans, and even military operation orders.”

LimeWire isn’t the one creating the “unacceptable risk,” it’s the foolish employees who do so. In no way, whatsoever, is it the fault of LimeWire, and other such programs, that the average government stooge is woefully uneducated when it comes to the proper use of a computer. The problem lies with those handling the computers and the sensitive information on them, not with the P2P programs.

Anyone who installs LimeWire is explicitly told that any information in the shared folder will be accessible to anyone on the network. And it’s not like this folder is names “My Shared Documents” or anything like that either. So, how bloody stupid would you have to be to place sensitive information in this folder?

Why isn’t Congress assailing the governmental IT departments of the various agencies critical to the maintenance of national security for even allowing users to install third-party, unauthorized software in the first place? Any network that has information on it sensitive enough to potentially harm an entire nation should simply not have direct access to the outside world, and should be locked down so tight that every mouse movement and keystroke is carefully scrutinized and logged.

The fact that Mark Gorton was even called in to testify, clearly shows how absolutely clueless the members of Congress are when it comes to the Internet. Their ignorance is downright infuriating. Instead of places the blame on P2P technology, they should spend their time passing legislation demanding that employees have a minimum degree of computer knowledge and security awareness.

Let’s suppose for a minute that you are a customer of Sprint, Verizon, or T-Mobile and you want an iPhone. Chances are that you’re still caught in the death grip of your current service contract, and unless it’s about to expire, you’ll probably have to lighten your wallet by a hefty $200 to cover the early termination fee. Ok, so you decide to pay the fee. At this point you aren’t tied to a contract; but, then again, you don’t have a phone either. Off to the Apple store to get that gorgeous new iPhone!

With iPhone in hand, you walk out of the store, drive home, and with a huge grin on your face, you happily unpack your brand new phone. At this point you might want to wipe the drool from you chin and make your way over the nearest computer to activate the thing. You happily log on the site, and proceed to fill in the necessary details. Then, all of sudden, that awesome grin of yours fades and you’re pissed. You’ve just realized that, in order to actually use the phone, you’ll have to sell your soul all over again – this time to AT&T, the exclusive iPhone carrier.

To the vast majority of brand new iPhone owners, this might not be a problem at all. I bet most Apple fans would be willing to do a whole lot more to get their hands on the so-called “Jesus Phone.” However, now that the iPhone is out and other companies see what their phones should be like, what happens when the next super-phone hits the market. Will you be willing to bite the bullet and lay down another $200 to redeem your soul?

This question, along with a variety of others, is currently being debated in congress at the insistence of the Open Internet Coalition. Since these hearings are clearly a by-product of Apple’s world famous phone, they have been unofficially dubbed the “iPhone Hearings.” But, many will be happy to know that if these hearings are successful, everyone will hopefully be able to get whatever phone they desire.

Wireless service providers, and monopolies in general, love doing everything they can to limit the amount of money that they have to throw towards research and development, marketing, and support, while maximizing their profit margin. One way of retarding the inevitable advancement in technology is by locking people into contracts, and, by doing so, isolating them from the competition. According to Chris Murray of the Consumers Union, contracts with termination fees work wonders to virtually eliminate competition.

AT&T and friends will probably try to convince Congress that they are forced to lock consumers in if they want to continue offering cheap and free phones. Sure, if that’s the case, then the companies may indeed need some assurance that you’ll stay with them for a certain amount of time, so that they can pay off the costs of giving phones away for next to nothing. However, this excuse quickly falls apart when the asking price for an iPhone is $600 (for the 8GB model). As soon as the cost of a phone reaches those kinds of numbers the only reason for locking consumers in is stifling competition and simple capitalist greed.

Another issue that the iPhone hearings are taking a look at is the notion that the wireless spectrum should be open. As it currently stands, there are four major wireless broadband providers, each with their own closed network. Together, these for behemoths have managed to take absolute control over roughly 96% of the nations broadband network; in other words, creating a new, competitive company is downright impossible.

With the explosion of the Internet, a whole slew of new communication methods have become available. One of those is VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), which allows the use of an application like Skype to make regular telephone calls. The Big Four see the rise of Skype, and the hundreds of other services like it, as a real threat to their livelihood. VoIP is dirt cheap in comparison, and totally void of contractual obligations. What Christopher Libertelli, the senior director of regulatory affairs for Skype, would like to see happen is for congress to open up that 96% of closed networks to more competition. Back in 1968, there was a landmark case, which resulted in the Carterfone decision, which basically allowed for third-party devices such as caller-ID systems and fax machines to use the existing AT&T networks. Hopefully, this decision will be able to help consumers win this battle once and for all!

The public was angry; they had had enough of the harsh oppression, the unrelenting control, and the panoptic supervision of the ruling elite. No longer was a distant monarchy going to exert its tyrannical oppression over the well-meaning individual; and the events that would soon come to pass where going to definitively prove that times were changing. Dressed up to disguise their identity, a passionate group of men boarded the HMS Dartmouth and dumped 45 tons of English tea into the harbor. The Boston Tea Party sent an unmistakably clear message to the British parliament: enough is enough; either policies start changing right away, or there will be far more serious consequences. The events of that day, the 16th of December, 1773, symbolized the final spark needed to light the fuse of unanimous revolt. Today, 233 years and 138 days later, a similar contempt lingers in the air, albeit in the digital realm.

Much like the Boston Tea Party, the revolt that Digg, a user driven social content website, is experiencing has not gone, and will not go, unnoticed. The rebellion is one of the first en masse protests against the forceful establishment of a DRM-driven society; a society in which everyone who wishes to use, sample, or share creative content must pay – over and over again. However, the enforcement of such a policy can only be truly effective through the placement of restrictions on the rights of the user, through the establishment of a system of Digital Rights Management, or DRM.

Unfortunately, the DRM systems currently in place are fundamentally flawed in their implementations and are also completely obvious to the notion of Fair Use, and as such they only really present a hindrance to casual users in their futile attempts to eradicate digital piracy. A paying user ought to be able to play, store, back-up, and share the content that he has legally bought without having to worry about such idiotically restrictive laws as the DMCA – sure, the DMCA does have some legitimate uses, but for the most part it has only managed to piss off the casual, well meaning consumer.

The fact that not a single content protection system has yet been able to reliably do what it was meant to do, has seriously upset an extremely passionate and dedicated group of individuals. Most of these individuals have no intention of illegally distributing copyrighted content, but the fact that varies companies and organizations are in essence forcing their users to become pirates to do what they would only naturally want to do has really taken its toll.

Tuesday, May 1st, a single submission which contained a recently discovered decryption key code for the AACS content (…or should I say “revenue”) protection scheme used to protect HD-DVDs found its way onto Digg. In near-record time the story secured a place on the coveted front page of the site. It didn’t take long for the watch dogs over at the Advanced Access Content System consortium to take notice and react with yet another DMCA takedown notice. Jay Adelson, the CEO of Digg, was naturally concerned about the continued, hassle-free existence of the site and as such decided that it would be in everyone’s best interest if he followed his lawyer’s advice and removed the submission. Furthermore, Jay also made it abundantly clear in his blog post that the reason for removal of the story was purely legal in nature, and that it had nothing to do with censorship:

Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law. Digg’s Terms of Use, and the terms of use of most popular sites, are required by law to include policies against the infringement of intellectual property. This helps protect Digg from claims of infringement and being shut down due to the posting of infringing material by others.

Our goal is always to maintain a purely democratic system for the submission and sharing of information – and we want Digg to continue to be a great resource for finding the best content. However, in order for that to happen, we all need to work together to protect Digg from exposure to lawsuits that could very quickly shut us down.

Unfortunately, the removal of the story did not go unnoticed – far, far from it. Within hours of the removal of the story, the entire Digg community seemed to be in uproar over the fact that their favorite news website would kowtow to bigger company. In response to the removal of the original story and also to illustrate to the AACS consortium how futile their efforts were, Digg die-hards flooded the front page with countless stories that in some way revealed the leaked hexadecimal key. Some stories were blatant in their purpose, while others found very creative ways to sneak the code in.

At first, the executives over at Digg tried to keep up their end of the law by deleting and preventing the submission of further stories about the key code. However, it soon became apparent that their efforts were just as futile as those of the government. This is where things took a surprising turn – supporters of a DMCA-free world might say this next event represented a small victory, but I contend otherwise. At 9 PM that evening, Kevin made a surprisingly stupid move; he actually posted the key code along with a concession that the efforts of the Digg community were beyond his power to control. Here is the post in its entirety:

Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c1

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Digg on,

Kevin

Kevin got far too caught up in the heat of the moment, and from a legal perspective he may very well have just killed Digg. In his post he blames the Digg community for not respecting the Terms of Use that Digg has in place. However, as this scenario unfolds the number of submissions to Digg that reveal the actual key code are irrelevant as long as Kevin, as one of the main honchos in charge of the start-up, is able to maintain that he and the rest of the executives did everything in their power to prevent the posting of the key. Not only does he admit that no one will be trying to prevent the posting of the code, he actually did it himself. If the AACS consortium or another company with a big stake in the prevention of piracy decides to press charges against Kevin’s site, they’d have a field day; Kevin would have a hard time “Digging” himself out of trouble.

The events that lead up to the Boston Tea Party in 1773 were, in many ways, quite similar to what we are seeing at the moment in the digital domain. The Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Acts of 1767 had angered well-meaning colonists for years, much like DRMs are doing today. Eventually, the anger over the policies became so extreme that something had to happen; something had to illustrate to the British that the colonist were fed up with the restrictions and regulations. As Steve Jobs said in his essay Thoughts on Music, “DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt piracy.” If the current restrictive trend continues then we might very well see another “digital Boston Tea Party” in the near future – (Thanks to Forbes.com for noticing that quote in the numerous Digg comments).

Flipping through channels, trying to find something to watch, I stumbled across a commercial set to an annoying tune. The commercial switched between the glowing commentaries of several different actual customers: “Vonage was so simple to install” and “No one asks, ‘hey, are you on VoIP?’” Well, they might not be asking, but seeing the dire straits that Vonage is currently in, you probably won’t be able to for much longer…

The trouble all started back in mid June of 2006, when Vonage acknowledged that they were being charged in a lawsuit filed by Verizon for supposedly infringing upon seven patents related to Verizon’s VoIP technology. The patents dealt with various protocol procedures, such as completing connections between users, authentication of callers, account validation, fraud protection, and network usage surveillance. Verizon, scared that they were being cheated out of their money, demanded that Vonage pay them a hefty $200 million, and cease and desist operations immediately.

The next significantly major event occurred on the 8th of Match in 2007, when a jury found Vonage guilty of infringing upon three of the patents held by Verizon – they were acquitted of infringing upon two others. As part of the judgment, Vonage was ordered to pay $58 million dollars, along with a 5.5% royalty rate for every new sale, to Verizon. As could be expected, Vonage felt that the verdict was unfair, and promised to appeal the decision. The patents that Vonage was found guilty of having infringed upon deal with the manner in which VoIP customers were being routed and connected to customers on traditional telephony grids; the implementation of basic call-waiting and voice-mail services; and also, how the protocol handled the use of Wi-Fi handsets in conjunction with the service. The other two patents were also found to be valid, but, according to the jury, Vonage didn’t infringe upon them.

Right after the verdict was handed down, Vonage announced that the existing Vonage customers, some 2.2 million subscribers, would not have to endure a loss of service because the company was working on getting a technological workaround in place. It quickly became apparent that the proposed workaround would probably take a lot longer than Verizon and the courts might be willing to wait. In light of this, Vonage managed to reach an agreement with VOIP, Inc. on April 3rd, 2007, that would allow them to use their infrastructure to continue service without interruption. This arrangement quickly took care of two out of three patent infringements.

Three days later, on April 6, the federal court of appeals handling the case granted Vonage a temporary stay, meaning that the company would be able to sign up new customers while the appeals process takes its course. Seeing as how the time from suit to verdict in round one took roughly nine months, this legal struggle may not end soon.

Although Verizon may have won the battle, the war is far from over. There seems to be a wide contention that the court has interpreted the Verizon patents too broadly. After all, two of patents deal with translating an IP address into a phone number – how basic is that? The third is hardly any less trivial; it deals with getting a call through to a short-range wireless device, such as a cordless home phone. If Verizon ends up winning the war as well, it could definitely set a very dangerous precedent for other big-name Telco’s. In light of the monopolistic nature of Verizon and friends, it wouldn’t seem unreasonable to assume that they might try to go after the rest of the VoIP community as well. Vonage was first, might Skype be next?

March 13 – Viacom announced today that it has filed suit against YouTube, and its parent company Google, for massive intentional copyright infringement. Viacom is seeking one billion dollars in compensation for supposed lost revenue and an injunction against any further infringements on the part of YouTube and Google.

Viacom, with a current market value of 24.99 billion dollars, is the media conglomerate behind numerous television networks and movie production houses, such as the MTV Networks, Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks movie studios. Considering what they own, it should come as little surprise that they are the copyrights holders to an extremely vast array of content, a lot of which has found its way onto YouTube.

Google recently spent 1.56 billion of its current 98.98 billion dollar market value to acquire the popular video sharing site YouTube. This acquisition might have made sense to Google at the time considering that the majority of Google’s annual earnings stem from targeted advertisements. The best way to make money via advertising is to get as much traffic as possible to the sites that host the ads, and YouTube arguably has the largest userbase of gullible, ready-to-click-anything teenage visitors of any site, save for MySpace perhaps.

While Google may have adhered to its philosophy of doing no evil, it may very well have inadvertently purchased a massive, multi-billion dollar thorn in its side. The biggest paradoxical problem that YouTube currently faces is that the site in not directly under Google’s control and that it is dependent upon its userbase for content and recurring visits. Most of the vital content that YouTube thrives upon is copyrighted and without it, YouTube would simply not be as successful as it currently is. In other words, if they were a hundred percent legit, they wouldn’t be as good.

In a press release related to the lawsuit, Viacom expresses their belief that “there is no question that YouTube and Google are continuing to take the fruit of [their] efforts without permission and destroying enormous value in the process.” While there may very well be a large element of truth to those allegations, it is also evident that Viacom is overlooking a critically beneficial aspect to the infringement of its TV shows and movies: YouTube is a magnificent promotional tool for televised Viacom content, and it’s completely free of charge.

Since YouTube does not allow the uploading of entire movies or television shows by significantly limiting the duration of clips, the uploading of short snippets of the actual show or movie poses little to no intrinsic threat to Viacom. If anything, seeing a short preview, if you will, of the full length content acts as a commercial and will most likely boost television ratings.

One, rather famous, example of this phenomena occurred back in December of 2005, when the Saturday Night Live skit “Lazy Sunday” made its way onto YouTube and instantly became a hit, garnering several million views in a matter of days. As soon as the presence of the skit on YouTube was brought to the attention of the promotionally-challenged upper echelon of NBC, the network didn’t think twice about unleashing its blood thirsty lawyers to have the clip removed. What NBC’s top guys failed to notice was that as a direct result of SNL’s exposure on YouTube the network suddenly saw a dramatic rise in the viewer numbers. NBC had essentially killed off the best free promotion that it had seen in years.

Since that debacle, there have been numerous studios and networks that have realized the power of the Internet in attracting new, young viewers, and they have made arrangements with YouTube to “leak” select content, hoping to win a few more eyeballs. In general, this strategy has worked quite well for those who realized what it was that interested YouTube visitors.

So, the whole question as to whether or not any significant damage was ever inflicted upon Viacom might get quite murky before any final judgments are made. If any damage was done, I doubt that it was anywhere near the tune of a billion dollars. In light of the lush market value that Google has, I think that it’s quite possible that Viacom just wants a share of the Google cake.

Six weeks ago, Apple, Inc. announced at the MacWorld Expo that they would be releasing a revolutionary new phone: the iPhone. That same day, Cisco Systems, who already had a product released under the very same name, filed suit against Apple for trademark infringement. The issue has now been settled, and neither company ever appeared in court.

Late Wednesday, February 21st, Apple and Cisco Systems released a joint statement in which they announced that they had managed to come to an agreement regarding Apple’s use of the iPhone name. Apparently, the two companies have now agreed to share the trademark; meaning that we might see two product lines, both named iPhone. Although the exact terms of the agreement were not released in their entirety due to nondisclosure agreements, Apple will now be able to go ahead as planned and release their new product under the iPhone name without further trouble. The statement didn’t include any mention of monetary agreements either way, but it did mention that the two companies would be working together in the future to solve security interoperability problems, as well as the exploration of new consumer and business communications ventures.

To me it looks like Cisco caved to the demands of Apple, and that Apple got exactly what it wanted. The “i” prefix is all-or-nothing to Apple these days, and I think that they would gladly have gone to court over the issue. Not only that, but Cisco really hasn’t done anything in terms of being recognized as having ever had an iPhone product line – which, by the way, are a series of VoIP phones. For Cisco it would have made little sense to go through a lengthy legal proceeding to defend the name of a product that hardly anyone knows about or even uses. If they hadn’t caved, it would probably have cost them a lot more to defend the name than to simply rename their product line. I bet that if the average consumer had been asked about the an iPhone before MacWorld that almost all of those asked would have associated the product with Apple, not Cisco.

As a small footnote, Cisco still sells their iPhone. You can find it at Amazon.com, amongst other places.

During the second day of MacWorld, Apple announced it’s highly anticipated new multi-media device, named the iPhone.The name seems real original, real Apple-esque, right?

Well, the name is actually what might bring the entire project down before it even takes off. The problem is that the name “iPhone” is in fact not that new and that Apple may not be the rightful trademark owner.

A mere day after the official announcement of the iPhone, Apple’s lawyers already had their hands full with a lawsuit from Cisco Systems, Inc. Cisco not only owns the trademark, but also has their own product called the iPhone as well.

The very first mention of an “iPhone” can be traced back to a trademark filed by Infogear Technology on March 20th, 1996. The trademark has been officially owned by Infogear since 1999, one year before the company was to be bought out by Cisco Systems. After the acquisition completed in 2000, everything that was formerly Infogear was then to be Cisco, including the iPhone trademark.

The trademark not only existed on paper, but also in practice; the name has been used twice since its filling. In 1997, Infogear launched a desktop phone called the iPhone. Incidentally this device also had a touchscreen and the ability to browse the web. And, late last year, Linksys, a division of Cisco Systems, launched a VoIP (Voice over IP) phone using the iPhone name once again.

There is some speculation that Cisco may have released their VoIP phone under the “iPhone” name so as to not loose the rights to the trademark as soon as Apple introduced theirs. The fact that Apple was going to release a product named the iPhone wasn’t as much of a surprise to Cisco as it was to the general public, since Apple had already been in contact with Cisco’s legal department regarding the trademark since 2001, and they have “approached [Cisco] several times over the past year,” according to Mark Chandler from Cisco.

Over the years, the two companies have negotiated over the trademark issue several times, and Cisco, according to Chandler, was confident that the two companies would be able to work out their differences, and maybe even partner up. Chandler also noted that the negotiations felt like they were drawing to a close, when Apple decided to announce the name for their new mobile device: the iPhone. After the announcement, Cisco gave Apple the chance to return to the negotiation tables immediately, but no response was heard, so a lawsuit was filed.

Contrary to popular belief, trademarks can in fact be lost and need to be actively protected in order to remain valid. According to Harvard law school:

“The rights to a trademark can be lost through abandonment, improper licensing or assignment, or genericity. A trademark is abandoned when its use is discontinued with an intent not to resume its use. Such intent can be inferred from the circumstances. Moreover, non-use for three consecutive years is prima facie evidence of abandonment. The basic idea is that trademark law only protects marks that are being used, and parties are not entitled to warehouse potentially useful marks”

The iPhone trademark that Cisco owns has been dormant for roughly six years, before they re-instituted it with the 2006 release of their VoIP phone. This was clearly before Apple recent announcement at MacWorld. It should be interesting to find out if, and when, Apple filed their patent for the “iPhone” name. If they did so before the release of Cisco’s phone, then they might very well have a decent chance at winning the lawsuit, as they should be able to prove that the trademark had been abandoned by Cisco Systems.

However, if this is not the case, Apple might lose and will most likely have to change the name of the product as well as pay damages to Cisco Systems.

• Please note that I am not a lawyer, and have no legal experience; therefore, don’t quote me on the legal proceedings to come.