Xperience the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10

The Xperia X10 could be the smartphone experience you’ve been wanting. Consider the 8.1 Megapixel digital camera and 4 inch touchscreen. Do you really need to be carrying another camera? Do you?

Before you answer, note that the Xperia camera has flash, 16x zoom, touch focus, geo-tagging, smile detection and a send to Web feature. Optimize for landscape, portrait, night shooting, beach scenes and more. You can edit your photos right in the phone using apps from the Android Market. Capture video wherever you happen to be and share it with whomever you please via multimedia messaging. Here’s something else unique. The face detection software recognizes up to 5 faces in a photo and stores them in your contacts.

Yes, this is an Android smartphone. It runs version 1.6 of the Google Android operating system on a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Combine that processing power with AT&T’s 3G/UMTS HSPA network and download at up to 7.2 Mbps. You can choose to connect to personal and corporate WiFi networks and have free access to AT&T hotspots nationwide.

This is also a world phone running on the GSM bands. You’ll be compatible with nearly every cellular tower worldwide on the 800, 850, 1800 and 1900 voice bands and the UMTS/HSPA 800, 850, 1900 and 2100 data bands. This phone is already a success overseas and now available for users in the US.

The Xperia X10 has been designed with social networking in mind. Sony Ericsson Timescape puts all of your status updates from your social networking sites in one place. The equally impressive Mediascape brings all of your music, videos and photos together. You can surf the Web, check email and chat using instant messaging with the full HTML browser. Enjoy streaming multimedia with real-time video streaming support for YouTube and AT&T Radio.

Could this be the new smartphone you’ve been waiting for? If so, you can get it at a terrific online discount right now. Learn more and order your Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 for AT&T.

Of course, there are many more smartphones you can choose from, including a number of Android models. All are available at deep discounts, with many free. Check out today’s specials at Cell Phone Plans Finder.

Internet rights, rates (and wrongs)

I have always been suspicious that the only reason that songwriter and music publisher collection societies the Performing Right Society (PRS) and the Mechanical Copyright Collection Society (MCPS) in the UK ever evolved into 'PRS for Music' was because that at that time no-one quite knew what a stream or a download was in law and that the merger only way they could sensibly (and legitimately) explain their right(s) to collect royalties from the use of their member’s songs on the internet. There was (and still is) much debate about what constitutes a 'stream' and what constitutes a 'download' and whether these form a public performance (whether a broadcast or a 'communication to the public') or more like the sale of a copy of a copyrighted work - a 'per unit' sale. There again, some ask whether they both? Or are they the same thing? Or is copyright law so hopelessly out of tune with the modern world that none of these definitions are actually applicable? Well now a US Federal appeals court has had a go at casting some much needed light on these issues and indeed on how the US collection society should be levying royalties for the use of (here) collection society ASCAP (songwriter and music publisher) members' works.

Looking at royalty rates first, The US Second Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned a District Court's decision that applied collection society ASCAP's streaming music royalty to Yahoo and RealNetworks’s activities and ordered a lower court to re-examine its findings. The Court of Appeals said that "in setting the royalty rate, the District Court must follow an approach more tailored to the varying nature and scope of Yahoo's music use" saying that "The district court did not adequately support the reasonableness of the 2.5% royalty rate applied to the value of the Internet companies' music use". The lower court was also ordered to "conduct a more complete analysis of the various uses of ASCAP's musical works by RealNetworks."

Judge John M. Walker, Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs and Judge Debra Ann Livingston said that the lower ("Rate") court’s establishment of benchmarks using the rates cable companies and broadcast stations pay for licensing music was inappropriate because the nature and scope of the online companies’ use of music differed significantly. The judges sided with Yahoo! and criticised the Rate court for relying on inconsistent sets of data sources when coming up with its music licensing formulae and said that the rate court’s attempt to come up with a simple 2.5% across-the-board license for the two online services was imprecise -and did not take into account the different kinds of services that both Yahoo! and RealNetworks offer. The three-judge panel also found that the Rate court did not give enough of a rationale for basing its licensing fee formula on the amount of time a piece of music is streamed, rather than on page views, which is the primary driver of advertising revenue. The appellate court also found that Yahoo can’t be compared to television stations because its business isn’t as reliant on music as the television industry with Judge Walker, giving the opinion of the Court, saying "Nearly every program on a television station somehow utilizes musical works,” adding “In contrast, only a fraction of the traffic on Yahoo!’s web site uses music — much of Yahoo!’s web site does not implicate any music whatsoever. Given that Yahoo!’s revenue base relies far less on ASCAP content than the television networks’ revenue base, we believe that comparing percentages of overall revenue bases is of little probative value in this benchmark analysis.” The judge also pointed to Yahoo!’s more specific licensing terms with BMI in the USA for the different kinds of uses of music as an example of how licensing agreements can be more reflective of the nature of the use of the music and noted that ASCAP’s own agreements with Turner Broadcasting for its various cable stations also accommodate different kinds of licenses depending on how each station uses music.

The appellate court did agree with the lower court on one separate, but key issue that ASCAP had appealed. The Court rejected the notion that a music download constitutes a "public performance" of a song. The Court held that downloads do not constitute a public performance of a work as defined under current US copyright law. The court said "In answering the question of whether a download is a public performance, we turn to Section 101 of the Copyright Act, which states that '[t]o ‘perform’ a work means to recite, render, play, dance, or act it, either directly or by means of any device or process'," ruling that "A download plainly is neither a 'dance' nor an 'act'. Thus, we must determine whether a download of a musical work falls within the meaning of the terms 'recite,' 'render,' or 'play'." Judge Walker then went on to say that the court would look at he ordinary sense of the words 'recite,' 'render,' and 'play' which refer to actions that can be perceived contemporaneously saying "Itzakh Perlman gives a 'recital' of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major when he performs it aloud before an audience .... Jimmy Hendrix memorably (or not, depending on one’s sensibility) offered a 'rendition' of the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock when he performed it aloud in 1969. Yo-Yo Ma 'plays' the Cello Suite No. 1 when he draws the bow across his cello strings to audibly reproduce the notes that Bach inscribed. Music is neither recited, rendered, nor played when a recording (electronic or otherwise) is simply delivered to a potential listener."

The court held that "The downloads at issue in this appeal are not musical performances that are contemporaneously perceived by the listener .... They are simply transfers of electronic files containing digital copies from an on-line server to a local hard drive. The downloaded songs are not performed in any perceptible manner during the transfers; the user must take some further action to play the songs after they are downloaded."The ruling also made a clear distinction with the streaming of files which, like broadcasts, had to be licensed for their performance saying "[Yahoo! and Real's] stream transmissions, which all parties agree constitute public performances, illustrate why a download is not a public performance. A stream is an electronic transmission that renders the musical work audible as it is received by the client-computer’s temporary memory. This transmission, like a television or radio broadcast, is a performance because there is a playing of the song that is perceived simultaneously with the transmission".

The Court sent the case back to the lower court to reconsider the method of calculating the licence fees due to ASCAP.


http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2010/09/28/appeals-court-music-downloads-not-039public-performances039

http://broadbandbreakfast.com/2010/09/ascap-music-licensing-fees-voided-for-yahoo-realnetworks/

http://www.out-law.com/page-11406

Broadview Networks OfficeSuite Brings The Cloud To SMB

As a small to medium size business, you’d like to embrace cost saving technologies like Enterprise VoIP, private IP networking and cloud services. But, oh, the investment to get into this game. You take another look at Internet-based services, but have serious concerns about quality and reliability of service. If only small to medium businesses without huge IT staffs could get the good stuff. But, wait, you can!

You can, indeed, upgrade to the latest in sophisticated telecommunications services without the big investment in dollars and staffing to do it all yourself. Broadview Networks has exactly the service you need in their OfficeSuite. It IS your office at one or many locations. You get the functionality of an enterprise-grade PBX or key telephone system. You get easy administration to add stations, sites and users through an ordinary Web browser. You get the ability to connect satellite and regional offices across the country with your main office using the same system and network. You get seamless communications with home-based employees and mobile professionals who have the same features and functionalities that are available on their office phones. You even get Internet access.

What you don’t get is grief and capital expenditures. OfficeSuite is a hosted VoIP system. That means that all the expensive and hard to maintain switching and server equipment is located in a Broadview Networks facility. They have the telecom talent to keep everything working 24/7 and enough resources to ensure that you can scale up your operation any time you want. What you have in your facility is telephones and computers connected to your 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps Ethernet LAN.

Now, be careful here. Not all hosted PBX solutions are the same. Some try to minimize costs by pressing the Internet into service as a telephone trunk line. Broadview Networks operates its own private network built on a redundant fiber-optic backbone. The difference between sending sensitive traffic, like telephone calls, over the wild and wooly Internet and sending them over a carefully controlled private network is the difference between take-what-you-get and dependable high quality performance. Broadview Networks can interconnect multiple locations through their converged MPLS network that maintains strict quality control on voice and data streams.

With advanced technology and quality networking, OfficeSuite offers not only the usual telephone features, but exciting extras that can improve your productivity. Hot Desking lets employees move around the office and between locations. They simply log in to a phone like they would log into an Internet account. Click to Dial lets you click on phone numbers in your Microsoft Outlook contact manager to immediately activate a speakerphone and call the contact selected. Get voicemail notifications and messages from any phone and receive messages through e-mail, even on your smartphone. Decide where to send calls if you can’t pick up. Inbound callers reach your Auto Attendant that prompts them to user extensions and company directories.

Are you ready for a more sophisticated phone system, or perhaps one that is easier to manage and doesn’t require you to run to the bank for a capital loan? Then get complementary consulting and quotes on OfficeSuite and other quality hosted PBX phone systems. You’ll likely find that trying to be your own phone company is more trouble that it is worth.

Bandwidth For Data Center Consolidation

Companies are always on the lookout for ways to save money, while still delivering the same value to their customers. Efficiency improvements are a sure winner. You may think you’ve wrung out all the efficiency you can from your data centers, but have you?

Most organizations don’t appear fully formed. They start out as small operations to test the market and the concept. Over years or decades, they outgrow facilities, add new products, acquire and merge with other companies, and so on. At any given point in this process, there is generally something to be gained by stepping back and considering how you would set things up if you had a clean sheet of paper.

One byproduct of company mergers and expansions is that you wind up with multiple data centers. Each installation made sense at the time. They are uniquely designed to serve the needs of a certain type of company, a certain size enterprise or certain product line. But when conditions change, you can find that there are creeping inefficiencies that come from patching things together here and there. It all works, but it may be costing you more than it could.

Data center consolidation is an activity that many companies are taking a closer look at, especially as top line growth stagnates and staff has been thinned out. You may not want to put everything in one location for the sake of redundant backup. But you may have bits and pieces here and there that can be easily combined. Fewer locations with fewer servers, larger servers and virtualization are all techniques that ultimately lead to the same or better performance at reduced cost.

Something to bring into the analysis is the cost and availability of bandwidth to support your consolidation efforts. That’s especially true if only the data centers are being consolidated but other operations continue at your geographically diverse locations. You’ll need some way to get data from place to place. That task used to fall to the site LAN, but now you’ll need a WAN connection.

Depending on how much traffic leaves data center and goes to each site, you may not need the same bandwidth that you have on your LAN. Workers at each location need access, of course, but the heavy processing may be local to the data center with just data entry and results going across the WAN. You’ll need to ascertain that bandwidth requirement and then check availability and pricing of bandwidth options.

Fortunately, bandwidth today is cheaper than ever with more options available. Ethernet is becoming more and more popular. It tends to be cheaper per Mbps than traditional T-carrier and SONET services. You can get point to point Ethernet line services or multipoint Ethernet LAN service. MPLS networks are often an excellent solution to the task of interconnecting multiple sites. They offer managed bandwidth, class of service options, and lower costs that proprietary networks.

Some companies are finding the the place to consolidate their data centers is in a colocation center or “carrier hotel” This is a completely managed facility will physical security, fire protection, backup power and a full time technical staff. You’ll often find the best bandwidth deals at colo centers because carriers establish points of presence within the facility to reach many customers at once. With multiple service providers vying for your business, you can often get outstanding deals on any level of bandwidth your require.

Are you in the midst of or considering a data center consolidation project? If so, get competitive quotes for your bandwidth needs from multiple service providers. This will help you minimize your costs, while getting the performance you need.

Sky porn leak puts ACS in the shot

Further to my blog on the Ministry of Sound’s efforts to combat online piracy, The Daily Mail reports that ‘thousands’ of Sky Broadband customers have had their personal details leaked online by hackers, apparently linked to The Pirate Bay, who then published the customer details, alongside a list of pornographic films they have downloaded and shared. The information , which included the full names and addresses of over 5,300 internet users, had been collected by law firm ACS:Law who had compiled a list of people it believed were illegally sharing adult films using anti-piracy software and third party investigators. Hackers from 4Chan attacked the firm’s website in retaliation to its anti-piracy efforts and around 1,000 confidential ACS:Law emails, including personal correspondence between Andrew Crossley - who runs the company - and his colleagues were leaked onto the popular file-sharing website The Pirate Bay. It seems that the list of Sky Broadband customers was an attachment on one of the emails.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1315790/Sky-internet-porn-details-leaked-Users-personal-information-appears-online.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

What is a PRI in VoIP?

We tend to think of VoIP as a “new generation” phone service based on IP technology unrelated to the historical public switched telephone network. Well there’s some truth in that, but no matter what you implement you’ll still be dealing with the good old PSTN. The bigger your company or organization, the more “outside” phone lines you’ll need. You should take a close look at ISDN PRI to make the connection to all the phones that are not part of your enterprise VoIP telephone system.

What is a PRI? It stands for Primary Rate Interface. That’s telephony talk for a particular standard related to another telephone industry term, ISDN. ISDN is the Integrated Services Digital Network. There’s a history to the development of ISDN that relates to the once lofty ambition of replacing all analog home and business phone lines with digital versions. You may not have heard of this, as it fizzled when broadband Internet came along and usurped the data role intended for ISDN. Even so, the business version persists and is more popular now than ever. That’s what’s called PRI or ISDN PRI or even T1 PRI.

Why T1 PRI? It’s because ISDN PRI is physically transported on a T1 line. T1 is another telephone industry standard widely used in business for dedicated Internet and point to point data connections. T1 lines have the advantages of being provisioned on copper wires so you don’t need fiber optics installed. They can be extended to nearly any distance, are highly reliable and reasonably priced. The pricing has gotten really attractive lately due to all the competition in the industry. With all this going for it, T1 makes a great choice to carry PRI.

What’s different between a regular T1 line and a T1 PRI line? The line speeds and voltages are the same. What differentiates a PRI is how it is organized. Instead of a big chunk of bandwidth, ISDN PRI is set up as 23 channels that each represent one digital telephone line. A 24th channel is used for signaling and data such as Caller ID. It’s an upgrade to an older T1 telephone standard that was set up as 24 phone channels and no Caller ID.

The beauty of bringing in an ISDN PRI line or “trunk”, as it is called, is that you get 23 outside phone lines coming in on a single digital line. It’s a lot more compact and is almost always cheaper, usually a lot cheaper, than dealing with 24 individual analog business lines.

The interface is also generally very easy. Most PBX and IP PBX telephone systems either come with ISDN PRI capability or offer it through a plug-in module you can buy. All the circuitry to convert between 23 individual phone lines and the PRI digital trunk are implement on that circuit board. You simply plug-in one or more ISDN PRI lines and you have outside phone lines and a lot of them.

But why would you connect a T1 PRI to a VoIP phone system rather than keep it 100% VoIP? The simple explanation is that the rest of the world isn’t serviced by VoIP or at least the same VoIP provider. The only thing universal is the PSTN, where you can dial any number and get connected to any telephone in the world. Your enterprise VoIP phone system can save you a bundle on internal calls that stay on your own network. You can also buy a SIP Trunk that connects you to a telephone service provider completely in IP or Internet Protocol. But, guess what happens at that service provider when you want to call an outside number? That’s right. You’ll be switched through to the ISDN PRI lines that connect them to the public phone network.

Which is the best deal for your company when it comes to analog (POTS) phone lines, ISDN PRI or SIP trunking? Why not let an expert consultant get you competitive quotes for these various options so you make an informed decision? The service is fast, easy and free.

"Music and Intellectual Property": a conference and a competition

Well, someone's got
something to sing about ...

"Music and Intellectual Property" is the title of a one-day conference which CLT Conferences is running on 8 December in Central London. Subtitled "Identifying, Protecting and Enforcing Rights in Music", the programme features a double input from the 1709 Blog: Ben Challis (General Counsel, Glastonbury Festivals Ltd) speaks on "The Glastonbury Tales: the Practicalities of Festival Life and IP", while Jeremy Phillips takes the chair for the day. There are some other excellent speakers too, and the day promises to scintillate.  You can see the full programme here.

There's a competition running along with this conference, the prize being complimentary admission -- and the fabled free lunch. It goes like this. Shakespeare's play Twelfth Night opens with Duke Orsino saying

"If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it".

Your task is to complete the following sentence:

"If music be the food of love, then copyright is ..."

Closing date for entries is 17 November. Competition entries should be emailed to Jeremy at the 1709 Blog with the subject line "Food of love".

The quiet mysteries of library ebooks

Reading a piece about second-hand ebooks, passed on to me by my new colleague Sebastian Davey at Swan Turton, I was reminded about an ad I’d seen on the train – about ebooks being available at my local library. So I went to see what was on offer. Here’s an extract from the FAQ:

How long can I keep them for? You can keep your chosen eBooks for two weeks.

Can I renew them after that time? eBooks can't be renewed in the traditional sense. However, if no one else wants the books you can borrow them again at the end of your two-week loan period.

Will I get any fines if I am late in returning my eBooks? No. You don't even have to return them. The file will simply become inactive after two weeks.

Will I be left with anything on my hard drive after my books have expired? Yes, a file will remain which you will have to delete. We have written some simple instructions to help you to do this.

What a delight! No more library fines …

So how does PLR work with ebooks? After all, you aren’t really ‘borrowing’ the ebook – you never give it back. The file just becomes inactive. The library is giving you a sublicence that comes to an end. Not the same thing as borrowing a physical book. Well, it’s all in that section of the Digital Economy Act that hardly got a mention in the heated debates, section 43.

It amends the Public Lending Right Act 1979 to say that

“book” includes … a work, other than an audio-book, recorded in electronic form and consisting mainly of (or of any combination of) written or spoken words or still pictures (an “e-book”);

“lent out”—
(a) means made available to a member of the public for use away from library premises for a limited time, but
(b) does not include being communicated by means of electronic transmission to a place other than library premises,

I know the Digital Economy Bill went through in a bit of a rush, but what on earth does (b) mean? It sounds like you have to go into the library with your Kindle and download it there.

Copyright lessons from (American) football

Last week, Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman, guest bloggers on the New York Times's Freakonomics blog, posted this interesting piece about what football (of the American variety) can teach us about the correlation between copyright protection and innovation. Though focused on copyright, their point can be made easily about any form of intellectual property protection. The question at heart is whether such IP protections are truly the catalyst for innovation.

As a child, I was taught "necessity is the mother of invention." Do you have a need that isn't being met? Create the solution! In law school, that lesson refocuses. Copyright protections (and patents) encourage creations; no one would create new ideas if they could be copied by others with no compensation. Right?

I must admit, as a bigger fan of soccer/football than of American football, I was not aware of just how much innovation has occured on the football field over the years. The Freakonomics post includes fascinating examples of innovations that would be valuable in the long run if copyrightable, but are still highly advantageous in the short term - winning now, this season - despite the fact that other teams are sure to copy the innovations later.

As the debate rages on in the U.S. whether copyright law should be extended to cover fashion designs, the argument that companies, designers, sports teams, must "innovate or die" in a highly competitive environment, regardless of IP protection, carries quite a bit of weight. I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't still ensure that innovations are able to be protected by IP rights for the benefit of the creator. We should. But perhaps the view that IP protection is required to spur design innovation needs rethinking.

Competitive Fiber Optic Service Nearby

Is your organization a high bandwidth user? By that, I mean you need reliable commercial bandwidth from 100 Mbps to 10 Gbps or higher. You can’t get there with bonded T1 lines or Ethernet over Copper. What you need is fiber optic service. But is competitive fiber optic bandwidth available anywhere nearby? Let’s check and see...



The fact is that buildings lit for fiber optic service are popping up faster than you can keep track of them. Why? Because today’s bandwidth hungry applications are demanding higher and higher network speeds. That includes connections that leave the LAN and go to the Internet or point to point to other locations. These connections carry large medical images, HD video streams, large database backups, engineering simulations and similar massive file transfers. Electronic medical records have dramatically ratcheted-up bandwidth requirements for hospitals and medical centers. Productivity software can only save you a fortune if it can operate efficiently. That means near-instaneous file transfers. Wait time is lost time and lost time is lost money.

Level 3, a major competitive carrier, has announced that it has 8,000 buildings on net for its metro fiber network. However, there an estimated 100,000 buildings that are around 500 feet away from those buildings. Those 100,000 locations are an opportunity well within reach.

Other competitive carriers, such as XO communication, are also aggressively expanding their fiber optic footprint in response to the demand for higher bandwidth than today’s connections can provide.

What sort of bandwidth options are available? The most popular service is Metro Ethernet. It is scalable so that you can order just the speed you need today and then easily upgrade when the need arises. It is also considerably less expensive than traditional SONET services, often just a fraction of the cost. Bandwidth? The sky is pretty much the limit. Standard Ethernet speeds of 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps and 10,000 Mbps are supported, as well as many increments in-between. In fact, Ethernet services are usually available as low as 3 Mbps, with 10 Mbps being a popular upgrade from T1 lines.

Could you use more bandwidth at a reasonable price, perhaps even a cost reduction? How about truly high speed service? Check availability and get Ethernet pricing quotes now.

Ministry put on hold

A number of Internet Service providers seem to have had some success in persuading Chief Master Winegarten that threatening letters being sent by lawyers Gallant MacMillan, on behalf of their client, the iconic London nighclub and record label Ministry of Sound, may be targeting innocent end users who have never infringed any of Ministry of Sound's copyrights.

Whilst the Chief Master professed some ignorance when it came to the technicalities of illegal downloading and peer-2-peer file swapping, The ISPS, which include PlusNet, 02, BT and Sky Broadband, argued that from all of the thousands of letters sent, not one end user had ever been sued. The Chief Master refused the Ministry of Sound’s request for more personal details of UK broadband ISP customers, stressing that the public's concerns must be addressed before the matter could proceed. The hearing has been adjourned until 4th October 2010.

Ministry of Sound Recordings Ltd v Plusnet Plc

For more on this story please go to
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2010/09/23/uk-isp-plusnet-illegal-file-sharing-judge-predicts-end-of-settlement-letters.html

Fascinated By The Samsung Fascinate

Are you familiar with the Samsung Galaxy S series of smartphones? Remember that name. This is the hottest design in cellular phone technology since the venerable Motorola RAZR phones. The whole idea of Galaxy S is to give you a mobile telephone, handheld computer, multimedia center and gaming device in a single ultra-portable package. The Samsung Fascinate for Verizon Wireless is the latest addition to this Galaxy S line.

The technology is as fascinating as the name. This phone sports a 4 inch Super AMOLED screen for a brighter image both indoors and outside where it is really bright. The 1 GHz Hummingbird processor gives you the computing power needed to deal with today’s streaming media. The integrated 5 Megapixel digital camera has both autofocus and the ability to record HD video on the go. Couple that with a DivX video player and MP3 music player.

Software for the Samsung Fascinate is equally impressive. It starts with the Android 2.1 operating system and all the apps that Android supports. You can text with Swype by simply sliding your finger over the letters to draft a text message. An integrated social hub unifies content from your Facebook, Twitter, Email and IM accounts.

How about connectivity? You’ll be connected to the Verizon Wireless 3G network, running the EV-DO Rev A cellular broadband standard. You also have WiFi capability and the ability to create a 3G Mobile HotSpot to wirelessly connect with up to 5 devices. Share your bandwidth or keep mum and enjoy it all to yourself. Oh, is that your boss over there needing a connection? Better enable that device if you know what’s good for your career!

Other fascinating features of this Samsung smartphone include integrated GPS with support for voice-guided, turn-by-turn directions by VZ Navigator. You can download a movie the day it is released with the Blockbuster mobile app. Catch your favorite football team in action with the new NFL mobile app.

Are you fascinated with this exciting new phone? Would you like to have one at a tremendous online discount? If so, learn more and order your Samsung Fascinate for Verizon Wireless now.

Of course, there are many other Android smartphones and other smart and basic cell phones available free or at a deep discount. Check out today’s special deals at Cell Phone Plans Finder and pick your favorite.

Google wins in Spain "A big win for the internet"

This morning, it was reported that Google has won a case in Spain where Telecinco was seeking to impose liability for YouTube in respect of content uploaded by users of YouTube.

With a mixture of hyperbole and predictability, Google has heralded the victory as "a big win for the internet"

What is fascinating about the reporting of this case is that, as far as I can see, in all instances (including this blog posting) the primary source of the information reported is not a formal case report or decision, but the Google press release posted on one of their own blogs - follow the link above to read it for yourselves. That press release was picked up by a number of news organisation and their reporting then spread around the internet.

European law undoubtedly does give protection to a hosting service in certain circumstances where it "does not have actual knowledge of illegal activity or information and, as regards claims for damages, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which the illegal activity or information is apparent" - but it is somewhat of a jump from that proposition to the conclusion that it is established law that YouTube is undoubtedly the beneficiary of that protection in all circumstances - nevertheless, many reputable news sources have reported Google's own coverage of their victory as if it were unblemished fact. What do readers think?

Managed Voice over MPLS For High Quality Enterprise Telephony

Companies with multiple locations are rapidly discovering the cost and performance advantages of MPLS networks. MPLS VPN networks are becoming the preferred way to interconnect multiple sites around the country and around the world. But what do you do about your voice services?


The traditional approach is to keep voice and data separate. The telephone system has a proven legacy based on switched circuit analog and digital trunking. Most PBX systems are set up to interface to standardized copper pair analog business lines or ISDN PRI digital trunks. These are your portal to the worldwide PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network that links every telephone set on Earth.

This traditional approach to business telephony has the advantage of guaranteed connectivity and proven voice quality. The incentive to change to something more advanced comes from potential cost savings and productivity features.

There are huge cost savings possible if you can combine your voice and data networks and keep your internal phone calls off the PSTN. Isn’t that what Enterprise VoIP about? That’s exactly what many major corporations are doing. But only well-healed companies can afford to manage their own nationwide converged private line networks. When it comes to international connections, the costs can go up dramatically. Is there a more cost effective option?

Why not use the same MPLS networks that provide data connectivity for your many geographically diverse sites to also carry your voice traffic? Well, why not? MPLS networks already have the requisite quality of service controls to ensure that voice packets won’t get trampled by data packets. The entire network is managed to ensure low latency, jitter and packet loss. It seems like a good match for IP telephony.

Indeed it is. That’s what VoMPLS or Voice over MPLS is all about. With VoMPLS, your internal telephone traffic stays on your own network. In fact, it’s the same network that interconnects all your PCs and other network device. You’ll only pay per-minute telephone charges when your calls have to go “off net” to the public phone system. You can make that connection yourself with ISDN PRI trunks connected to your company PBX or you can outsource call termination to a SIP trunking service.

Does VoMPLS make sense for your company or organization? New services, including one just announced by AireSpring, are making this option the best cost/performance choice more and more. Find out with a quick inquiry about Voice over MPLS network options.

Pirates sunk in Sweden

After a spectacular showing in the European elections in 2009, the Pirate Party has done woefully in national elections in Sweden taking just 0.7% of the vote, a 90% slump in a year, according to exit polls. They will not be awarded any seats having failed to reach the 4% threshold needed for seats. In the European elections they gained 2 MEPs. The chief Pirate, Rick Falkvinge, told Torrentfreak "The Swedish Pirate Party did its best election campaign ever. We had more media, more articles, more debates, more ... flyers than ever. Unfortunately, the wind was not in our sails this time, as it was with the European elections," adding "The other parties had put a collective blanket over the privacy, culture and knowledge issues, as they had absolutely nothing to gain by even mentioning the issues" and concluding with "If the wind is not in your sails, the sweat on your brow will still not steer the ship. I guess the most obvious example is how the appellate trial of The Pirate Bay will begin just nine days after the election."

http://torrentfreak.com/swedish-pirate-party-fails-to-enter-parliament-100919/

NetWolves Leverages The Power Of The Pack

When you are looking for a comprehensive solution to all of your business voice and data needs, it’s pays to have a wolf doing your bidding. NetWolves is an aggressive service provider with an unusual flexibility to optimize the exact suite of services you need.

First and foremost, NetWolves is an FCC-licenced and tariffed carrier in all 50 states. But beyond that, they have strategic agreements with over 120 leading telecommunications carriers. By leveraging the power of the pack when it comes to telecom service providers, NetWolves can pick and choose from an enormous menu of available services to get exactly the right mix for your particular applications. Many carriers are working from a much shorter line card and need to fit your requirements into whatever they have available.

Most businesses, even the smallest, have a particular mix of needs that include telephone, Internet, security, offsite backup, remote workers, employees in the field, private data transfers, e-commerce, and perhaps multiple site connectivity. NetWolves takes all of this into consideration and custom designs an array of services tailored to your situation. They also offer consulting and management services as an adjunct to your IT team or as the IT support for companies that don’t have their own staff.

NetWolves can offer you a complete range of voice services including multi-carrier solutions on a single invoice. These voice services include switched outbound and inbound toll-free service plus intrastate, interstate and international calls over your existing business lines. Do you have your own PBX or IP PBX system? NetWolves can provide the ISDN PRI and VoIP services you need to support whatever phone system you have. That includes ANI (Automatic Number Identification) and DNIS (Dialed Number Identification Service).

Data services include private lines from 56K/DS0, DDS, T1/DS1 at 1.5 Mbps, on up to T3/DS3 lines running at 45 Mbps. For multiple locations, you can get MPLS network connections that create a VPN or Virtual Private Network. NetWolves also offers VPN security technology that includes IPSec VPN and SSL VPN. While IPSec VPN is ideal when transferring large amounts of data over a secure site to site connection, SSL VPN is an attractive solution to support business travelers and partners who need secure access only for email and small files.

NetWolves is capable of providing complete network management for your company. Their WolfPac security platforms act as network gatekeepers to control access into and out of a company’s network. Security services are scalable and include Stateful Inspection firewall, IPSec, SSL VPN, intrusion detection, congestion management, quality of service control, email virus protection, content filtering and other services with the ability to provide 24x7 monitoring.

Could your organization benefit from the capabilities of NetWolves or other highly competitive carriers anxious to bid for your business? If so, get price quotes tailored to your requirements for whatever level of service you need.

European copyright reform: a meeting -- of minds?

Given their different backgrounds and cultures, it was not surprising
that Europeans found it so hard to reach consensus on a copyright code

The annual BLACA–IPI Seminar takes place on 14 October in the London office of law firm Bird & Bird.  The subject is European Copyright Reform.  Speakers will include Jonathan Griffiths (Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary, University of London) on "Reform of the three-step test", Paul Torremans (Professor of Intellectual Property Law, University of Nottingham) on the limitations of an EU approach to a copyright code, plus contributions from Mr Justice Arnold, Frances Lowe and Uma Suthersanen (on orphan works).

The cost is as follows: IPI and Blaca members £25; others £50.  Students go free.
To attend please email the IPI here and reserve your place.

The 1709 Blog is pleased to note that, after a long quiet summer, the Intellectual Property Institute is showing signs of renewed life.

New Copyright Tribunal Chairman

Congratulations go to Colin Birss QC on his appointment, announced yesterday and effective 5 October, as new Chairman of the Copyright Tribunal (and Judge of the Patents County Court).

His Honour Judge Birss QC, as he will be known, is a relatively youthful 45 and became a silk in 2008. He has been one of the Deputy Chairmen of the Copyright Tribunal since last year.

Earlier this year, the Tribunal rules were modernised with the ambition of streamlining the Tribunal process and introducing more pro-active case management - we wish His Honour every success in delivering on these aspirations.

Copygrounds gets Tenenbaum

A new copyright web forum called Copygrounds has been launched by staff and students at the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas. The first blog is a fascinating interview with Joel Tenenbaum, who became the poster boy for illegal filesharers around the world after being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (see previous blogs here!).

Copygrounds describes itself as “an academic discussion forum and digital media platform which focuses on the technological changes now taking place within contemporary media systems. The dynamics of technological development have been accompanied by numerous antagonisms and outright conflicts between parties with conflicting interests. These antagonisms and conflicts are the particular target of our analysis.”

The Tenenbaum interview is posted by Debbie Rosenbaum. Debbie is currently completing a dual law and business degree at Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School and is a member of the team of Harvard Law School students who, under the guidance of Professor Charles Nesson, mounted Tenenbaum’s defence. There is quite a large blogging team with some pretty impressive CVs, so a site well worth watching.

The site is open and welcomes public commentary – but also says “as this is primarily a student project, commentary which is not suitable for a classroom setting will be removed.”

http://copygrounds.com/

For more comment see http://torrentfreak.com/confessions-of-a-convicted-riaa-victim-100916/

International VPLS Offers Worldwide Connectivity

For businesses and organizations that have offices worldwide, the ideal networking solution would be to have your own private LAN that included all of your locations for voice, video and data. But that’s a pipe dream, right? Once you leave your property, you have to use telecom services to connect from location to location. Or do you? With International VPLS, the world is your LAN as well as your oyster.

The name gives it away. VPLS stands for Virtual Private LAN Service. It’s the best thing to actually stringing your own fiber optic lines between sites. Of course, that’s impractical. But you can get essentially the same performance at a very reasonable cost with International Ethernet VPLS.

Here’s how it works. Each location connects to an International MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) cloud network using an Ethernet access connection. This can be a fiber optic line for high bandwidth or an EoC (Ethernet over Copper) line for bandwidths below about 50 Mbps. Regardless of the physical layer technology, you’ll be connecting Ethernet from your LAN to an Ethernet line that runs to your service provider.

The magic of VPLS is that all connections are made as Ethernet connections. An MPLS network can handle any protocol, so pseudowires are used to provide Ethernet connectivity between locations. Regardless of how many local area networks you have, or how many locations you are connecting, or where in the world those locations are, you will have the equivalent of one large layer2 switched Ethernet LAN. An office PC in Zurich is just as close on the network as the printer in Tokyo or the server in New York.

How about security? That’s where the “virtual private” designation for VPLS comes in. Your Ethernet access lines are all fully dedicated to your use. The MPLS network is a shared resource, but it uses proprietary tag switching technology unique to that type of private network. There is no connection with the Internet at all. Also, the pseudowire connections that are set up by the service provider transport only your traffic and only between the locations you specify. Of course, if you want even higher level of security you can choose to encrypt your data for an extra layer of protection.

Is an international or domestic VPLS solution right for your company or organization? You may be able to save considerably compared to the cost of proprietary networks using point to point lines, with increased performance as flexibility of adding/deleting sites as well. Find out now with a quick inquiry about International Ethernet VPLS for your locations.

Droit de repentir: can anyone help?

At a seminar earlier today I mentioned the French droit de repentir , this being the author's right to prevent further reproduction, distribution or representation in return for compensation paid to the distributor of the work for the damage done to him, under Article L121-4 of the French IP law. I was asked about limitations on the exercise of this right and said I didn't think there were any.

My understanding is supported by the statement in Wikipedia that

"The moral rights are inalienable, perpetual and inviolable. They pass to the author's heirs or executor on the author's death, but may not be otherwise transferred or sold under any circumstances, by either the author or his legal successors. Any agreement to waive an author's moral rights is null and void, although the author cannot be forced to protect his work".

However, there was some speculation as to whether there exist, in any circumstances, any form of limitation to the exercise of this very powerful right, which might appear to be a disincentive to investment in the commercial exploitation of a work in France. Can any readers advise? Also, does anyone know whether the right can be asserted in France with regard to further exploitation outside France itself?

1 in 4 local firms plan newspaper ad cuts: poll

Nearly one in four local businesses plan to cut back on newspaper advertising this year, according to a poll being released today. And there is no mystery about what they are doing with the money.At the same time those businesses trim newspaper expenditures, the survey found, many of them plan to aggressively ramp up spending on a broad array of web, social and mobile media. Insights into the

Try Cloud Website Load Testing Free

You’ve built your online presence. The question is whether you’ve built a house of straw, a house of sticks or the proverbial brick house. All websites look great when the server is just stilling there idling. The real test is when the visitors come in droves. Can your site handle the traffic? There’s only one way to know. You need to do load testing.

There are different ways to do load testing. BrowserMob offers some significant advantages for business users who take their online presence seriously. It’s reasonably priced, considering the value of lost business when your site crumbles under the load. That’s business you’ll never get back. Frustrated users are gone for good. This is especially important with the holiday season looming. Your worst e-commerce nightmare could be a ton of traffic, each user with credit card in hand, and nothing but a stalled out storefront or hideous 404 page staring them in the face.

How do you make sure your website is up to the task? Give it a serious test before the real onslaught arrives. BrowserMob gives you a choice of real browser users, virtual users or a combination of both. They use real browsers to create an experience that more accurately mimics the real user experience. Massive amounts of simulated traffic is generated by a cloud computing resource utilizing a huge pool of IP addresses.

Why not blast your site with up to 5,000 concurrent browsers? Simulate as many as 500,000 sessions with a maximum capacity of 6,0000 Mbps. Make sure you are doing it right with expert testing advice from the BrowserMob load testing and website monitoring experts.

What’s the best way to get started? Why, with a load test of course. If you like what you see, you can then move on to choose a service plan appropriate to the size of your operation.

Please note: The free website load test from Browser Mob is no longer available. Sorry.

All about Greenhouses - Google Books

All about Greenhouses - Google Books

I found some really good information on the hoop style greenhouse that I want to build for my back yard.  The door design is the best that I've found so far during my internet searches.  The fan location is a nice addition as well although I think I'd slightly modify the design to have fans above the doors at each end with vents that close to allow for maximum air circulation and ventilation.

There are tons more ideas and styles of greenhouses in this book so if you like it click the link above and buy the book to support the author!

$150 Hoop-Style Greenhouse | Alberta Home Gardening

How to Build an Inexpensive Hoop-Style Greenhouse | Alberta Home Gardening

Prison for camming – a UK first

Emmanuel Nimley, 22, yesterday received a 6-month sentence for filming movies with his iPhone at The Vue cinema in Harrow and uploading them to silverscreen.com. His motive: self-glory. The Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) say this is the first-ever UK prison sentence for ‘camming’.

In the US, cammers are prosecuted under the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 – e.g. ‘the Dark Knight’ got 2 years – but the UK does not have a specific provision for this offence. According to TorrentFreak, Nimley had been charged under the Fraud Act 2006 (ss. 6 and 7) and section 107 (1)(e) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

‘Nicholas Bull, defending,’ the Mail reported, ‘asked the judge to take into account the amateur quality of his client’s work: “The camera was unstable. It was audible my client was drinking and eating throughout at times it was tilted up to view the top of the cinema.”’

The Samsung Epic 4G offers Epic Performance

What would you think of a smartphone that can run rings around a netbook computer? What if you politely declined WiFi hotspot service because it would slow you down? Can you handle that kind of speed in a cell phone?

There’s a lot that makes this phone special, but the Sprint WiMAX 4G network connectivity makes you believe it’s epic. Peak download speeds can exceed 10 Mbps. That’s an order of magnitude faster than 3G. Instead of being a WiFi user, you’ll be a WiFi provider with mobile hotspot capability to support other devices as long as you are in a 3G or 4G service area. Treat your unconnected friends or colleagues while you’re on the road. Or give yourself anywhere connectivity for the times you need a laptop, notebook or tablet computer.

If the speed of this Android 2.1 smartphone has you drooling, wait till you see the display. This is no ordinary touchscreen. The Super AMOLED thin touchscreen offers a near-HD display at 100x the contrast of other leading phones. It also features pinch-to-zoom, six axis motion and proximity sensors.

This advanced display is a good match with the 5 megapixel digital camera with camcorder mode, dual LED flash, auto-focus, live video share, and geo-tagging. Record in HD and easily playback wirelessly on your HDTV or other DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) certified devices. Oh, by the way, there’s another camera. It’s mounted on the face of the display so that you can enjoy video chats. This is a VGA camera, so you’ll look good in the picture.

Back to the blazing speed of this phone. In addition to WiFI, 4G and 3G connectivity, the processor in this smartphone is a 1 GHz Cortex A8 Hummingbird. In the 4G and WiFi modes, you’ll have simultaneous voice and data capability for increased multitasking. With many other phones, you have to switch back and forth.

The Samsung Epic is not only faster than a certain competing smartphone that rhymes with grapple, but it has something else eschewed in Cupertino. It’s a slide out QWERTY keyboard. That’s right, real keys for real typing. You also have an on-screen virtual keyboard and SWYPE typing options as a matter of personal choice. Text messaging, instant messaging, multimedia messaging, email and HTML Web browsing are all at your fingertips. Did I mention this thing moves like lightning?

The Samsung Epic isn’t for everyone. Just for everyone who can’t settle for lesser technology once they know the performance bar has been raised. If you are one of those who demands the latest and the best, you’ll enjoy a tremendous online discount when you order your Samsung Epic 4G with a new Sprint account.

Of course, there are many more heavily discounted and even free smartphones available for your perusal. Check out the daily specials now at Cell Phone Plans Finder.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!

Last month, blogger Ben posted this piece highlighting the Recording Industry Association of America’s complaint that U.S. copyright law isn’t working in protecting their copyrighted content from appearing illegally on the Internet. Perhaps, the RIAA should take a cue from the numerous copyright owners who are now working in cooperation with YouTube to monetize infringements.

According to a September 2 article about new YouTube revenue streams, available here, if a user uploads a video that incorporates copyrighted material owned by another person or entity, the copyright owner could choose an alternative to having the video removed through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act take-down process. Instead, the copyright owner could allow the video to remain posted and allow YouTube (a subsidiary of Google) to run Google ads at the bottom of the video. In return, the copyright owner receives half of the ad revenue generated by the Google ads, with the other half of the revenue being kept by YouTube.

Given the difficulty of preventing unauthorized uses of copyrighted material on the Internet, copyright owners may benefit more by leveraging the apparent popularity of their material in return for unanticipated cash payments. Of course, the copyright owners would retain the option to determine whether the most appropriate course of action is to have the video taken down or to allow it to remain viewable with embedded ad content.

An initially-unauthorized video from the TV show Mad Men generates revenue through Google ads, right.

As Google has perfected the art of “targeted advertising,” the ads visible on such videos could be targeted for the likely viewer. Dave Marsey, senior vice president of media at Digitas, explained to the New York Times, “Google smartly realized that consumers consume different types of media throughout the day. Search is a huge component of that, but there are times when you want some entertainment or you want to solve a problem and going to YouTube makes sense.” In fact, YouTube reports that hundreds of content partners with which it shares ad revenue receive more than $100,000 a year. One clever example described in the article could become a new source of income for the RIAA: an unauthorized upload of Eminem’s “Not Afraid” was permitted by the copyright owner to remain viewable with ads linking to authorized sites through which viewers could purchase the song or ring tone. The revenue generated was split between the copyright owner and YouTube.

This “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” strategy seems like a win for all involved: the video poster avoids having his video removed, interested viewers of the video maintain access, YouTube generates revenue that will help it reach profitability, and the copyright owners enjoy increased brand impressions with each view, as well as (and possibly more importantly in a down economy) an increase in their revenues. Content owners should thus consider whether this strategy may work well for them, especially if they frequently expend time and resources issuing DMCA take-down notices.

Ethernet over Copper Growing By Leaps and Bounds

What’s the hottest new access network service? It’s clearly Ethernet over Copper. So hot is it that competitive carriers are scrambling to add coverage as fast as they can. An recent example is XO Communications, a major player in EoC, that just expanded its Ethernet over Copper network by more than 30%.

Just what is Ethernet over Copper and why is it so hot? The technology was developed in response to changing network priorities. WAN or Wide Area Network networks have traditionally been the domain of the telephone industry, which has adapted telephone transport technology to also carry data and video.

T1 lines have been used almost universally by businesses for point to point and dedicated Ethernet connections. They can be configured to transport 1.5 Mbps in both the upload and download directions. What’s made T1 so universal is that it is provisioned on two pair of ordinary copper telephone wires.

Ethernet over Copper also makes use of those same copper telephone wires, some of which have been in the ground for decades. Why push this old copper into service when fiber optics is so much more advanced? Simply because there is so much copper available and perfectly functional. Every business location has copper telephone bundles installed by default. If you want fiber optic service, you need to be in a fiber lit building or often be willing to pay the construction costs of extending fiber from the nearest carrier point to presence to your location. If copper will work, construction costs are minimal to non-existant.

But what can you do with copper? You can extend your LAN across town or across the country. You can even connect internationally to include locations overseas. Want a fast, reliable connection to the Internet? EoC will give you just that.

But why Ethernet over Copper instead of just sticking with the venerable T1 line? It comes down to cost, bandwidth and services. EoC is typically cheaper than T1 for the same level of bandwidth. In fact, you can often get 3 Mbps Ethernet for the same price as 1.5 Mbps T1. The most popular service is 10 Mbps Ethernet over Copper, although you can also get 20 Mbps and sometimes up to 50 Mbps over copper. T1 bandwidth can also be increased by bundling multiple T1 lines together, but the cost is often prohibitive above 10 Mbps.

In addition, Ethernet over Copper keeps your network protocol as Ethernet from LAN to WAN and back to LAN. That allows you to create virtual LANs that include multiple locations acting as one bridged LAN network. Ethernet line and LAN services are becoming very popular with businesses that support multiple locations.

Is Ethernet over Copper a service that would benefit your company or organization? Before you sign a contract for any other service, be sure to get pricing and availability of Ethernet over Copper bandwidth. It can be an eye-opener.

Wireless SIP Trunking

One thing we know about business telephone and dedicated broadband access is that they are wireline services. Well, that’s what we used to know. There’s a new player in the marketplace and it is wireless SIP trunking.

A pioneer in this field is Airband Communications. They offer enterprise-class IP-based voice services bundled with wireless Internet access. In wireline parlance, this could be called a SIP trunk or Integrated voice and data service. But Airband VoIP trunking service has some unique advantages.

Like other integrated services, there is only one WAN connection providing both telephone and broadband Internet access. This one just happens to be wireless. Also like the better integrated services, bandwidth is dynamically allocated between voice and data to make efficient use of the connection. Voice packets get priority to maintain quality of service. The bandwidth sharing of voice and data also only exists between your facility and Airband. Your telephone calls never travel on the Internet and aren’t subject to the disruptive effects of congestion, jitter and latency on the public network. In fact, you get a unified service level agreement from Airband that covers availability, packet loss, latency and jitter for your peace of mind.

Standard telephone trunking using ISDN PRI generally comes in blocks of 23 channel with a maximum carrying capacity of 23 separate phone lines. Airband’s VoIP trunks can be added in single increments. Buy these outside phone line connections as business picks up and you need them rather than paying for excess resources up front.

A standard package starts at 5 VoIP trunks minimum bundled with 2 Mbps of Internet access. This is perfect for smaller businesses, with unlimited local calling and 200 minutes of domestic long distance per trunk. 911 support is included. So is local number portability so you can keep the phone numbers you have now. You’ll also get both inbound and outbound caller name and ID. If you want, you can add-on DIDs (Direct Inward Dialing), toll free numbers and directory listing, and analog/Fax/security lines. The interface of this system will support either PRI or SIP to your in-house telephone system.

Don’t confuse this fixed wireless service with either cellular or WiFi services. This is professional grade private fixed wireless network with 128 bit data encryption and quality of service (QoS) controls. The radios at each end automatically adjust 8 levels of signal modulation to ensure reliable transmission in all types of weather. In fact Airband offers Dual Path Service Delivery (DPSD) that automatically fails over to the backup service should the main path ever fail. With wireline services, you have to do this yourself by ordering separate diverse line services from different carriers or take your chances on line breaks.

Could your business or organization benefit from a high quality fixed wireless solution with bandwidth up to Gigabit Ethernet? If so, get service availability and pricing on fixed wireless for voice and data now.