Illegal music downloads on the increase

A report just published by the BPI, the representative body for the British recorded music industry, shows that illegal file downloading continues apace, with 7.7 million people illegally downloading 1.2 billion tracks at a cost to the retail industry of £219 million. These large numbers are in spite of the publicity surrounding the Digital Economy Act which provides for repeat offenders’ internet connections to be cut after three warning letters. However, Ofcom has yet to produce the Code of Practice needed for this to be put into place so it looks as if there will be plenty of illegal activity for the forseeable future. For the more honest among us the best way to get free music could be to put that long list of wanted albums on our Christmas lists in the hope that someone will buy us the CD (or download them for us from an authorised site). Or, if you don't mind listening to ads, you could try the free legal streaming services available.

Sally Creissen, Library & Information Services Manager, DMH Stallard LLP

Virtual war over Wikileaks

The establishment is turning its back on Wikileaks - Amazon, PayPal, Mastercard, Visa. Twitter has been forced to explain why wikileaks is not trending on the site. Founder, Julian Assange, is in custody in the UK fighting attempts to extradite him to Sweden on sex crime charges.

But it's not all going one way. As we blogged earlier this week, "Operation Payback" is in full swing. There are well over a thousand Wikileaks mirrors (1368 as of this morning) and supporters have started downloading a botnet to attack websites of those against Wikileaks. And now threats of a lawsuit against Visa and Mastercard by Wikileaks payment processor, Datacell, presumably for breach of contract.

Love Wikileaks or loathe it, this is a fascinating battle being waged both in the cloud and in the real world. The legal fallout is likely to continue for quite some time yet.

Wikileaks vs the cloud: UPDATE

UPDATE to our original post:

• Swiss bank PostFinance, has frozen Wikileaks' accounts 
• A warrant for Mr Assange's arrest has been received in the UK which is where he is believed to be hiding
• According to the Wikileaks Swiss site there are 507 mirror sites

Wikileaks vs the cloud

Wikileaks power off?

Wikileaks is polarising debate and it's proving a fascinating test of the power of the cloud.

The US Government has suffered such embarrassment following the publication of sensitive information that Hillary Clinton apologised to USA's allies. And, while the French government is working out how to prevent the site from being hosted in France, the Chinese government has blocked the site in China.

Its founder, Julian Assange, is being sought for questioning in Sweden about sex crime allegations dating from when he was in the country earlier in the year.

Cloud provider Amazon Web Services has refused to host the site due to a breach of its terms of use as Wikileaks didn't own all the content itself. Also, PayPal has stopped accepting donations to the site pointing to breaches of its acceptable use policy by Wikileaks encouraging, promoting, facilitating or instructing others to engage in illegal activity.

Assange has said that if he is forced to appear before authorities, he will release the whole unfiltered file including data which, until now, has been edited out, such as names of spies.

Putting aside arguments over right and wrong, this is turning out to be a real test of the cloud. On the one hand, the established powers have attempted to shut down Wikileaks. On the other hand, the cloud/internet community is responding. Whether people view this as a battle against authority or a battle for the protection of free speech, they have combined to set up numerous Wikilieaks mirror sites, 355 according to the latest count today.

But people are asking another question. The survival of Wikileaks is because of the cloud community coming to its rescue. What about ordinary businesses who have entrusted their data to the cloud: what guarantees are there that their data will survive in the cloud? Won't a cloud provider simply pull the plug if it is afraid of hosting your data?

Well, for the vast majority of businesses whose data doesn't embarrass international relations and doesn't contain data that could be a threat to national security, they're unlikely to be the subject of a Wikileaks-style shutdown. However, if you think your data is of the type that might cause cloud providers to want to stop providing you with a service, then perhaps you need to keep your data in-house or rely upon a bespoke service from a cloud provider who understands your business. Ultimately though, complying with the law of the land is not optional.

What is the cloud?

Photo by SixRevisions via Flickr

What is cloud computing? What is it to you and your business? Accenture have filmed 10 year old children explaining what the cloud means to them with the reminder that children never experienced life before broadband internet, life without mobile phones or online stores. And children are the next consumers, employees and managers...

EU patent in the offing? Google translations on the way?

Persuading all 27 member states of the EU to adopt a single European patent system (whereby patents would only be issued in the three main official languages of the EU - English, French and German) has proved impossible so far. Currently most member states require a translation of the whole patent into their own language before it can be validated, costing on average €14,000. According to the Proposal for a Council Regulation on the translation arrangements for the European Union patent, published in July 2010 this translation cost could be reduced to €620 under a single European patent system.

Italy is still holding out for Italian translations to be a requirement, but the European Commission is to be asked to back a proposal from Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Estonia for a common patent agreement based on "enhanced cooperation" between them. 

This news comes as Google signs a Memorandum of Understanding with the European Patent Office to translate approximately 1.5 million patents into 29 different languages, hopefully paving the way to faster and more effective machine translations of patents.

So there is yet hope that the EU can work to reduce the cost of obtaining a patent so that costs are more in line with the US, where, it is estimated, the cost of obtaining a patent is 90% less than in the EU - thereby increasing competitiveness, encouraging and protecting European invention. For now, we look to see what Google can deliver...

Sally Creissen, Library & Information Services Manager, DMH Stallard LLP