Privacy - the disappearing web

News Flashes page two:

Corporate Spying on Employees Doubles to 78 Percent - July.2000
   An American Management Association report out this year says 78 percent of major U.S. firms record and review employee communications and activities, including phone calls, email, Internet activity, and computer files (double what it was in 1997). Twenty-two percent of the companies don't tell their employees they are doing so. Some scan emails and Web sites for keywords, some pick messages at random, others look for words in email subject lines, and some just read entire emails.
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Internet Law Journal - July.200 -The Internet Law Journal has gathered domain name disputes, MP3 lawsuits, privacy issues, and indeed all the good legal stuff from the Web.
http://www.tilj.com/
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Publius: Censorship Resistant Publishing System - July.2000
   Publius takes its name from the pseudonym of the authors of "The Federalist Papers" (Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison), who found it useful to anonymously express their support of the US Constitution.
   Publius relies on distributing documents across numerous servers in such a way that even the server owners don't know what documents they host. There's a lot of high-level crypto math here, but in essence a Perl program of a mere 1,500 lines does all the hard work. Users can read and publish documents anonymously from their own browser.
Publius: http://cs1.cs.nyu.edu/waldman/publius/
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ACLU v. Reno II Victory! - June.2000
Appeals Court Rejects Congress' Second Attempt at Cyber-Censorship
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Cookiegate - June.14.2000
   USA - Privacy groups have gone on the offensive and are calling on Congress to investigate the Clinton administration's use of cookies as part of its anti-illegal drug campaign.
   The request comes a day after the White House admitted it violated federal privacy guidelines by tracking users who searched for drug-related information online.
   "Monitoring citizens' use of government websites raises profound privacy and constitutional concerns," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
   Caught in the middle of this flap is New York-based Internet advertising giant DoubleClick, which brought tracking technology into the mainstream as a method of measuring the effectiveness of Internet ads, and is serving the banner advertisements for this campaign.
   DoubleClick told The Wall Street Journal yesterday that "no personally identifiable data about visitors were given to the government," but the privacy groups say they are skeptical. They have asked DoubleClick to provide a guarantee to the public that it has destroyed all the information it held that could in future link any individual with visits to the drug-related sites.
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What's really happening with 'struggling' online news
By Jon Katz
At the Freedom Forum
http://www.freedomforum.org/news/2000/06/2000-06-21-10.asp
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The Web of the Corporate Spider
RIAA and MP3.COM Move to Shut Down Napster - June.13.2000

   The Recording Industry Association of America filed a brief yesterday asking U.S. Judge Marilyn Hall Patel to grant an injunction preventing Napster from facilitating or assisting others in, the copying, downloading, uploading, transmission or distribution of copyrighted musical works. Napster is named as a breeding ground for widespread copyright infringement, and such an order would shut down Napster.

   Many artists have stated their support for Napster. Courtney Love and Sheryl Crowe are among musicians who said Napster offered them a market for their music that eliminated their having to going through, and share their earnings with, the major record labels. So you can expect that the wrath now being poured on Napster, will in the future rain down ten fold on artists who try to go it alone.

   Groups like RIAA believe that there is a grave risk that the public will begin to perceive and believe that they have a right to obtain copyrighted materials for free. To understand the issue let's look at it from other angles.

   Groups like RIAA and others that protect the music, motion picture and book industry appear to be fighting to put money in the pockets of artists. One big name writer, Stephen King, recently said that writers should make money like carpenters and so on. King would pull his new work offline if people pirate it too much.

   They do appear to be right. But are they? I would say not. Yes writers do deserve to make money, yet the current system has ripped writers off for decades if not forever. The majority of writers struggle and make little money. The collapse of the system that enriches only a few big name writers like King may be necessary if writers are to ever see any money. Online the only real money is in getting a job writing for a top web site. Only big name writers like King can sell online. In that sense the publishing industry has to shift gears. Their new role is in picking up writers and providing them the promotion so they can sell online. It is not in providing just editors and a printing press as in the past.

   How about the music and motion picture industry - is there anything they don't like other than Napster? Well - a recent article in a Toronto paper had key players revealing that those groups have wanted everything from video cassette recorders to home CD burners made illegal. They have also opposed the sale of blank tapes and other blank media that can be used for copying. If they had their way they would have a complete stranglehold over our lives, the means of production, civil liberties and the marketplace.

   RIAA has a series of interviews with college kids, and says it is evidence that CD sales are falling in college markets. Contradicting this is a recent study by Pew Internet and American Life Project that says people use Napster and Gnutella to sample music and to find new music. They go out and purchase the music they've downloaded. Actual factual evidence recently released by RIAA says that the music industry - especially non-copy-protected CD's - is booming. Not only did the record industry sell 10.8% more CD's than last year, they raised their income on those disks by 12.3% - so not only are you buying more music, you're paying more for each disk you buy. Income from CD's alone increased by 1.4 billion dollars last year. So where's the crippling damage from evil music pirates? If they're suffering so badly, why does the profit chart look like Microsoft's?

   Making this whole thing look worse is the origins of the CD industry. The public was promised that allowing the shift to CDs would make everything cheaper. Instead the industry used CDs as a control mechanism to raise prices.

   There is also the civil liberties issue in this deal. In an attempt to wound Napster, the band Metallica unleashed lawyers on more than 330,000 Napster users - many of them kids - who allegedly downloaded the band's music. Metallica used its elite status to legitimize a large-scale invasion of privacy, and a punitive campaign. Its targets had no idea their online movements were being tracked, and they thought they had the right to pursue individual cultural interests without worrying about they being watched by Metallica or Wayne Newton or whoever.

   Perhaps there isn't a good guy in this. Napster is a greedy corporation, just like the rest. And dot.com corporations are getting a reputation as the shallowest and greediest organizations ever created. RIAA, the entertainment giants and their copyright protection machines are a larger looming evil. In many cases like with MP3.COM, the two evils have joined hands.

They have used us as cannon fodder in their disputes.
Tomorrow they'll use us as pawns in their new Corporate Spider Web.
Kiss freedom goodbye.
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Gary Morton
http://frightlibrary.com
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At Salon - Courtney Love on MP3's and record company monopolies.
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Study Proves that Music Piracy Isn't Piracy - June.2000 - The Recording Industry Association of America has infuriated netizens with its nasty efforts to squelch the exchange of music MP3s on college campuses and the net.
  A new survey conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project slaps RIAA in the face. It found that of those illegally downloading music only 37 percent are college students. 48 percent are between the ages of 18-29. 42 percent are between 30-49, while the remaining 10 percent are over 50. Men are more likely to download illegal music files than women: Sixty-four percent of the respondents who admitted pirating music are male.
   The demographics of so-called music pirates has turned some heads in the industry, said Amanda Lenhart, a Pew research specialist. She said the study should encourage label executives to create easy-to-use alternatives to programs like Napster and Gnutella because people are willing to pay for music they find online.
   The truth is that these users are not pirates at all. They are using Napster and Gnutella to sample music and to find new music. They go out and purchase the music they've downloaded.
   The study also brings into the question the industry's obsession with creating secure download formats. More sampling means more sales. Yet more security makes online music files lose appeal.
   Over three-quarters of the Internet users don't take advantage of free online music at all. RIAA has attacked civil liberties in the name of copyright, for no reason at all.
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