Posts Tagged IP address

Yet Another Judge Slams Copyright Trolls; Warns That Courts Should Not Be Used To ‘Bludgeon’ People Into Settling | Techdirt

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Ethics, Legal on May 5, 2012


Yet Another Judge Slams Copyright Trolls; Warns That Courts Should Not Be Used To ‘Bludgeon’ People Into Settling

from the down-they-go dept

Reminiscent of the Righthaven cases, where once judges realized what was really happening they quickly started dumping them, it seems that we’re reaching the tipping point with porn companies playing the copyright trolling game as well. More and more of the attempts to seek expedited discovery are getting rejected in sternly worded rulings from judges who recognize that the sole purpose of the lawsuit isn’t to go to trial, but to get expedited discovery in order to shake people down for cash. The latest such ruling in an increasingly long line comes out of the Eastern District of NY, where judge Gary Brown issued a nice smackdown on copyright trolls. The judge first notes the ridiculousness of relying on IP addresses to identify the individuals, citing a bunch of cases, before noting that an IP address simply does not indicate the “true identity” of the defendant.

In sum, although the complaints state that IP addresses are assigned to “devices” and thus by discovering the individual associated with that IP address will reveal “defendants’ true identity,” this is unlikely to be the case. Most, if not all, of the IP addresses will actually reflect a wireless router or other networking device, meaning that while the ISPs will provide the name of its subscriber, the alleged infringer could be the subscriber, a member of his or her family, an employee, invitee, neighbor or interloper

There are a number of issues specific to the claims of the plaintiff, K-Beech in this case, including its failure to register the copyrights in question, and a weak attempt at lumping in a trademark claim after this came to light. However, what becomes clear pretty quickly is that the judge isn’t buying any of this, and sees that it’s really just an attempt to use the courts to shake people down. It starts off with the discovery request going far beyond what’s necessary to take a case to trial:

However, not all the information sought is required to advance the claim. For example, in addition to names and addresses, plaintiffs seek both the home telephone numbers and email addresses of the putative John Does… information which is clearly not required to proceed with this action. In particular, obtaining the home telephone numbers seems calculated to further plaintiffs’ settlement strategies, discussed above, rather than advancing their claims by allowing them to effect service.

But the larger point is that the court recognizes these kinds of copyright trolling lawsuits as “abusive litigation tactics.” While the court notes that it can and should encourage settlements, it also notes that the rules say those settlements should be “just” and it’s not clear that’s what’s happening here:

Our federal court system provides litigants with some of the finest tools available to assist in resolving disputes; the courts should not, however, permit those tools to be used as a bludgeon.

The court then goes on to agree with many other courts in noting that lumping a bunch of defendants together in the same lawsuit is improper joinder, and agrees to only allow discovery on the very first IP address named in each of the lawsuits being considered.

 

On the whole, there isn’t that much different about this ruling from a bunch of other recent rulings, but it’s another one to add to the pile, and it gets clearer and clearer every day that the courts are now aware of how trolls are abusing the system, and less and less likely to allow such abuse.

Yet Another Judge Slams Copyright Trolls; Warns That Courts Should Not Be Used To ‘Bludgeon’ People Into Settling | Techdirt.

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Facebook Offers More Disclosure to Users – NYTimes.com

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Facebook on April 13, 2012


Facebook Offers More Disclosure to Users

By KEVIN J. O’BRIEN

Published: April 12, 2012

 

Facebook, seeking to address concerns about the personal information it collects on its users, said Thursday that it would provide any user with more about the data it tracks and stores.

Ronald Zak/Associated Press

Max Schrems, the German law student whose complaints last year about how Facebook tracked and stored his data focused attention on privacy concerns.

In a posting on its privacy blog, Facebook said the expanded archive feature would be introduced gradually to its 845 million monthly active users. It goes beyond the first archive made available in 2010, which has been criticized as incomplete by privacy advocates and regulators in Europe.

The archive Facebook published two years ago gave users a copy of their photos, posts, messages, list of friends and chat conversations. The new version, Facebook said, includes previous user names, friend requests and the Internet protocol addresses of the computers that users have logged in from. More categories of information will be made available in the future, Facebook said.

Online social networks offer free services to users and make money primarily through advertising, which can often be directed more effectively using the information the network has collected on them.

Facebook, which is preparing for an initial public stock offering, most likely in May, has been trying to accommodate government officials in Europe, where privacy laws are more stringent than in the United States.

Facebook’s data collection practices have tested the boundaries of Europe’s privacy laws. The social networking site, based in Menlo Park, Calif., is Europe’s leading online network, according to comScore, a research firm in Reston, Va.

In December, the Irish Data Protection Commission reached an agreement with Facebook, which runs its international businesses from offices in Dublin, to provide more information to its users and amend its data protection practices. “We took up their recommendation to make more data available to Facebook users through this expanded functionality,” the company said in a statement.

Facebook agreed to make those changes by July. In Europe, 40,000 Facebook users have already requested a full copy of the data that the site has compiled on each of them, straining the company’s ability to respond. Under European privacy law, the company must comply with the requests within 40 days.

Max Schrems, the German law student who filed the complaint leading to the agreement with the Irish authorities, criticized Facebook’s latest offer as insufficient.

“We welcome that Facebook users are now getting more access to their data, but Facebook is still not in line with the European Data Protection Law,” said Mr. Schrems, a student at the University of Vienna. “With the changes, Facebook will only offer access to 39 data categories, while it is holding at least 84 such data categories about every user.”

In 2011, Mr. Schrems requested his own data from Facebook and received files with information in 57 categories. The disclosure, Mr. Schrems said, showed that Facebook was keeping information he had previously deleted from the Web site, and was also storing information on his whereabouts, gleaned from his computer’s I.P. address.

Facebook’s data collection practices are being scrutinized in Brussels as European Unionpolicy makers deliberate on changes to the European Data Protection Directive, which was last revised in 1995. The commissioner responsible for the update, Viviane Reding, has cited Facebook’s data collection practices in pushing for a requirement that online businesses delete all information held on individuals at the user’s request.

Ulrich Börger, a privacy lawyer with Latham & Watkins in Hamburg, said he thought it was unlikely that the European Union would enact laws that would significantly restrict the use of customized advertising, which is at the core of the business model for Web sites like Facebook. It is more likely, Mr. Börger said, that lawmakers would require Facebook and other networking sites to revise their consent policies to make them more easy to understand. But it was unlikely that Facebook would be legally prevented from using information from individuals who sign up for the service.

“I don’t see any fundamental change,” Mr. Börger said. “It comes back to the question of consent. They cannot go so far as to prohibit things that people are willing to consent to. That would violate an individual’s freedom to receive services they want to receive.”

 Facebook Offers More Disclosure to Users – NYTimes.com.

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Big news for IPv6: Akamai to launch service in April – NETWORKWORLD

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Government, Internet on March 26, 2012


Big news for IPv6: Akamai to launch service in April

World’s largest CDN to offer IPv4-to-IPv6 translation and dual-stack to all customers

By Carolyn Duffy Marsan, Network World
March 26, 2012 09:17 AM ET

Akamai will offer IPv6 services to its entire customer base in April — a long-awaited move that will be a major boon to the adoption rate of the next-generation Internet Protocol.

Carrying between 20% and 30% of the Internet’s Web traffic on any given day, Akamai is the world’s largest content delivery network (CDN). Akamai’s engineering team has been working for two years to upgrade its 95,000 servers in 71 countries connected by 1,900 networks to support IPv6.

“We’re highly supportive of IPv6,” says Mike Cucchi, director of product marketing for Akamai. “We’re a large consumer of IP addresses as well, so there are internal drivers. We need and want IPv6 addresses as well as just supporting the Internet community as it migrates to IPv6.”

MORE: IPv6 due for wide deployment in 2012, experts say

IPv6 is an upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol, which is called IPv4.

IPv6 features an expanded addressing scheme that can support billions of devices connected directly to the Internet. But IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4, which is running out of addresses. Network operators can either support both protocols in what’s called dual-stack mode or translate between IPv4 and IPv6.

In April, Akamai will announce built-in support for IPv6 in its three major product lines: Aqua for consumer-oriented services, Terra for enterprises and Sola for media companies. Companies will be able to upgrade to these application-as-a-service offerings in a matter of days, rather than spending weeks or months upgrading their own Web servers to support IPv6.

“We know IPv6 is part of doing business on the Internet, and we’re going to include it on all of our platforms,” Cucchi says.

Akamai hoped to release its production-grade IPv6 services by the end of 2011, but the task proved more difficult than originally anticipated. Akamai has been beta testing its IPv6 services with key customers since last fall.

BACKGROUND: Akamai: Why our IPv6 upgrade is harder than Google’s

Akamai’s support for IPv6 will make it easier for its media and enterprise customers to serve up Web content to Internet users that have IPv6-only addresses, which is increasingly common in Asia and Europe. Among Akamai’s customers are Apple, Lands’ End, Ticketmaster, Travelocity and XM Satellite Radio. Akamai delivers more than 5 terabits/sec of Web traffic per day.

We want to act as a translator,” Cucchi says. “Our customers can leverage Akamai through these transitional times. … We can terminate IPv6 requests at the edge and send forth IPv4 to the data center environment. Our future roadmap will have a two-way translation that occurs.”

Akamai’s timing is ideal for U.S. federal agencies, which are required by an Obama administration mandate to support IPv6 on their public-facing websites and Web services by Sept. 30. Akamai’s federal customers include the Department of Defense, the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Administration.

:We’ve had a number of government sites transition to being dual-stacked at Akamai,” says Eric Nygren, chief architect for Akamai. “We’re working with the rest of our government customers to help them” with the September deadline.

RELATED: White House issues IPv6 directive

Akamai says its April launch of commercial-grade IPv6 services is on target for when its government and enterprise customers will deploy IPv6.

“2012 is the year for the design-and-build phases around the world,” Cucchi says. “We’ve been getting ready for this. Now the market is starting to take IPv6 seriously. … By the end of 2012, we’re going to see some real uptick in the percent of IPv6 traffic we see out there.”

Today, only 0.5% of the Internet traffic that Akamai carries is IPv6. However, that will change come April, when Akamai moves out of its beta test program and announces full availability of its IPv6 services.

Akamai says it has run into some difficulty deploying IPv6 because IPv6 services are not available from all ISPs around the globe. Also, several major ISP networks are not peering with each other over IPv6, causing backbone routing issues.

“We’re seeing a lot more backbone brokenness on the IPv6 Internet than on the IPv4 Internet. We’re doing a lot to try to help,” Nygren says, adding that some data center locations don’t have IPv6 connectivity at all. “Using Akamai for IPv6 will be extremely valuable to [our customers] to help them deal with the brokenness. Their users will have a better chance of getting to that content if we’re serving it up near them versus going halfway around the world.”

Another problem that Akamai has run into is malware that takes advantage of IPv6.

“You can go make your website dual stack and add Quad-A records, and now malware will follow that Quad-A record,” Nygren says. “It will start port-scanning your site or spidering your site and start attacking you over IPv6 if your [intrusion detection system] or firewall aren’t set up for IPv6. We can help mitigate this threat by being between customers and IPv6-based attacks.”

Akamai says its IPv6-based services will help protect customers from IPv6-based malware as well as IPv6 floods and distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks.

“On our platform, we have this nice benefit of being a huge shock absorber,” Cucchi says. “We not only translate IPv6 requests, but we only forward well-formed HTTP requests. Synfloods and IPv6 floods are all dropped at the edge of our network.”

In related news, Akamai has committed to participate in World IPv6 Launch Day, a June 6 deadline for network operators to enable IPv6 on their public-facing websites and leave it on for good. Other Internet companies that have committed to launch IPv6 on June 6 include Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft. Akamai says its April launch of commercial IPv6 services will help companies and government agencies that want to participate in the June 6 event, which is being sponsored by the Internet Society.

 

 Big news for IPv6: Akamai to launch service in April.

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