"Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, has taken a keen interest in Mexico, where more than 47,500 people have been killed in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against the cartels in 2006. Schmidt recently visited most of Mexico's most violent cities, Ciudad Juarez, where civic leaders asked if he could help.

"Defeated, helpless, these people have been so hardened in their experience with cartels that they have lost battles and they have lost hope," Schmidt told a conference on international crime this week. "They were looking for a universal hammer to protect them. For me the answer was obvious. It was technology.""

""I think at the end of the day, there really are bad people, and you have to go in and arrest them and kill them," he said."

The provision of standard IT equipment to the IP offices of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Islamic Republic of Iran that occurred in the preceding years, within the context of the Organization’s business modernization program for IP Offices in developing countries, is being referred to the relevant UN Sanctions Committees for their information and guidance.

The initial steps are being undertaken for a full external and independent review of the technical assistance provided to countries subject to UN sanctions.

A new internal instruction has been issued ending any provision of IT hardware in any of WIPO’s technical assistance programs.

“There’s a relatively small number of countries who benefit from hardware as opposed to our complete software package,” Gurry said. “And since certain member states perceive that there is some ambiguity in the use of standard IT equipment – printers, cartridges, PCs and servers – we think the only complete answer we can give because of their perception of ambiguity is to say, we no longer do that.”

“We can argue for hours and hours and hours about the legal interpretation, that it’s only a few PCs, and so on,” he said. “But if there’s lingering doubt, let's eliminate it.”

Yesterday, Vint Cerf distributed an open letter regarding concerns about the Measuring Broadband America measurement infrastructure. We share the objectives of the letter writers that “Open data and an independent, transparent measurement framework must be the cornerstones of any scientifically credible broadband Internet access measurement program.” Unfortunately, the letter claims: “Specifically, that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering a proposal to replace the Measurement Lab server infrastructure with closed infrastructure, run by the participating Internet service providers (ISPs) whose own speeds are being measured.” This is false.

The FCC is not considering replacing the Measurement Labs infrastructure. As part of a consensus-based discussion in the Measurement Collaborative, a group of public interest, research and ISP representatives, we have discussed how to enhance the existing measurement infrastructure to ensure the validity of the measurement data. Any such enhancements would be implemented solely to provide additional resiliency for the measurement infrastructure, not to replace existing infrastructure. Any data gathered would be subject to the same standards of data access and openness.

Recently, Techdirt reported on the ruling by a German court on the issue of filtering -- whether Internet sites have a responsibility to block files continually if they have been notified about infringing materials once, sometimes called "Notice and Stay Down". The German court basically said they do, but the highest French court has taken a different view (French original.)

The Court of Appeal in Paris had ruled that Google had a duty to make sure that an unauthorized copy of a film was not re-posted to YouTube after it had been removed following a complaint. However, the Court of Cassation, the court of final appeal for civil and criminal matters in France, struck down this judgment. Its logic was as follows: if a Web site were expected to take down every future copy of a file that had been removed following a complaint, but without being told exactly where the new copies were located, the only way it could achieve that was by constantly monitoring all users to check that they were not uploading that file. That, the Court of Cassation ruled, was not proportionate and, furthermore, forbidden by European law (presumably a reference to the SABAM ruling from earlier this year.)

That's the good news. The bad news is that HADOPI threatens to rear its ugly head here. According to the same post on the French PC Inpact site, Article L336-2 of the HADOPI law introduced an extremely broad duty to do everything possible to stop copyright infringement. Quite what that means in practice has never been tested, but following the Court of Cassation's rejection of filtering, it seems likely that we shall find out soon enough.

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Last month I convened an emergency meeting of my cabinet and top homeland security, intelligence and defense officials. Across the country trains had derailed, including one carrying industrial chemicals that exploded into a toxic cloud. Water treatment plants in several states had shut down, contaminating drinking water and causing Americans to fall ill.

Our nation, it appeared, was under cyber attack. Unknown hackers, perhaps a world away, had inserted malicious software into the computer networks of private-sector companies that operate most of our transportation, water and other critical infrastructure systems.

Last year, a water plant in Texas disconnected its control system from the Internet after a hacker posted pictures of the facility's internal controls. More recently, hackers penetrated the networks of companies that operate our natural-gas pipelines

We recently wrote about the RIAA's latest target in their ongoing quest to kill any technology that could be used to infringe, regardless of its other purposes: sites that allow easy downloading of content from YouTube. We noted at the time how Google itself was participating in these efforts, and had blocked YouTube access by YouTube-MP3.org—a handy tool that quickly converted the audio track of any YouTube video into a downloadable mp3 (I've used it myself for plenty of legitimate purposes—most recently downloading a bunch of public domain tango classics). Of course, Google treats this as a terms of service issue, and even though it's likely that copyright pressure from the RIAA and others is a significant cause of their attitude towards such tools, they also have a motivation to keep users within the YouTube website.

Whatever Google's motivations, it should come as no surprise that the users—and providers—of such tools get pretty annoyed when they are blocked. Through PaidContent, we learn of a petition to Google launched by the founder of YouTube-MP3.org, asking the company to allow third-party recording tools. The petition, which is nearly at its goal of a million signatures, makes the case that this is how things have always been:

For decades people were allowed to take a private copy of a public broadcast. You could record the radio program with a cassette recorder or make a copy of your favorite movie by using a video recorder. All these techniques have been opposed heavily in its early years by the big media companies who didn't want the public to have such technology. They did describe such technology as criminal and as a threat to their business.

Several years later history is about to repeat: Google has teamed up with the RIAA to make the same claims against all sorts of online recording tools for their 21th century broadcasting service: YouTube ("Broadcast yourself"). Google is taking action against nearly every service that enables its users to create a private copy of a public YouTube broadcast while the RIAA is threatening news media like CNet for promoting such a software.

While I agree with the purpose of the petition, I actually think this description misses the mark. The real point is that recording is still entirely possible. With everything from screen capture software and programs like AudioHijack to the good old fashioned analog hole (where you could still use those same VCRs and cassette tapes if you wanted) there is just no way to stop it, which makes sense, because the simple fact is that the data is being transmitted to your computer. Your computer may be instructed to discard it soon after, and to not make it obvious where it's storing it in the mean time, but that data is still there and gets copied several times on the way from the server to your screen—it's just a matter of capturing and retaining one of those copies. Meanwhile, services like YouTube-MP3.org are not quite recording devices: rather than capture the data at the rate it is delivered to your computer for playback, they bypass the streaming interface to obtain a full copy of the source file. This is a technical distinction, but an important one—and it has potential legal implications, since the one way such a service could be seen to violate copyright law is under the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA.

That said, the fact that recording will always be possible highlights the silliness of blocking such tools and of anti-circumvention laws in general. The fact is that YouTube is making this data publicly available, and their servers obediently deliver the files. Blacklisting particular sites and citing "terms of service" is a weak response, and at its core is rather similar to websites that claim you need permission to link to them or to display them in an iframe within another website. Google knows as well as anyone that one of the true sources of the internet's potential is the ability to build on top of other services, and to build new services around other sources of data, so it's disappointing to see them block tools like this. Hopefully the growing response from users will spur them to rethink their position.

We all know that in a matter of weeks or even days, there will be streamed copies online. There could be hundreds and thousands of them. At first, the quality will be terrible. Later, the quality will improve. By this time next year, you will be able to download an HD copy of your own without too much trouble. And this is despite the millions and billions of dollars, and the gigantic apparatus of the state, plus all the warnings and jails, dedicated to preventing this inevitable thing.

And yet: what does it matter? “Dark Knight Rises” will still make a zillion dollars. I like millions of others will shell out to see it in the theater of course. Like everyone else, I want to consume it sooner rather than later. Sure, I could save $11 bucks by waiting but there’s a time-preference issue. The movie makers are going to make a mint with clever management, clever marketing, and a high-quality product. In other words, they will make money the old-fashioned way: getting people something they want in a form in which they want to consume it.

I can easily imagine that not much would be different about this scenario if there were no IP — except that a major element of fear and force would be purged from the system and consumers would no longer be treated as the thieving enemy.

“We were doing the Charleston,” Stern said. That’s when two police officers approached and pulled a “Footloose.”
“They said, ‘What are you doing?’ and we said, ‘We’re dancing,’ ” she recalled. “And they said, ‘You can’t do that on the platform.’ ”

And so, as their training manuals surely instructed them to do, the officers demanded to see their IDs. Because they were dancing. Where someone was playing the drums. In the most cosmopolitan and culturally-rich city in America. In any case, when Hess could only produce a credit card (which had his name and photo on it), this happened:

"The officers ordered the couple to go with them — even though the credit card had the dentist’s picture and signature. When Hess began trying to film the encounter, things got ugly, Stern said.“We brought out the camera, and that’s when they called backup,” she said. “That’s when eight ninja cops came from out of nowhere.”

The ninja cops then alledgedly tackled Hess to the floor, cuffed both of them, and detained the pair for twenty-three hours. The initial charge was apparently impeding the flow of traffic of what is reported to have been three other people on the platform. The police then added other charges, such as resisting arrest.

All charges were subsequently dropped when the paperwork was finally reviewed by the NYPD's Not Crazy Department. The couple are now suing in Manhattan courts, but maybe it's time a national memo went out to law enforcement agencies reminding them that dancing people with cameras don't necessarily need to be tackled?