Usenet Provider Giganews Wins Landmark Copyright Battle

Giganews is celebrating a hard-fought legal battle against adult publisher and serial copyright litigant Perfect 10. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit handed the Usenet giant a comprehensive victory in the long-running case, one that will prove so financially damaging to Perfect 10 that the company will go into liquidation.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Over the years, adult image publisher Perfect 10 developed a reputation for making a business out of suing Internet services for alleged copyright infringement.

The company targeted Google, Amazon, MasterCard and Visa, even hosting providers such as LeaseWeb and OVH. After securing several private settlements in earlier actions, the company sued Usenet provider Giganews after Perfect 10 images appeared on Giganews servers. Things didn’t go well.

In November 2014, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California found that Giganews was not liable for the infringing activities of its users. Perfect 10 was subsequently ordered to pay Giganews $5.6m in attorney’s fees and costs.

With Perfect 10 not quite done the case went to appeal, but in an opinion just handed down by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the adult publisher has received a crushing defeat. The panel held that to be held liable for direct copyright infringement, Giganews must have committed some voluntary act that caused the infringement to occur. The requirements for such “volitional conduct” were not met.

“The panel concluded that the evidence showed only that Giganews’ actions were akin to passively storing material at the direction of users in order to make that material available to other users upon request, or automatically copying, storing, and transmitting materials upon instigation by others,” the ruling reads.

The panel also found that Giganews was not liable for contributory infringement after Perfect 10 failed to show that Giganews “materially contributed to or induced infringement.”

On Perfect 10’s claim for vicarious infringement, the panel upheld the district court’s summary judgment in Giganews’ favor, noting that Perfect 10 failed to show a “causal link between the infringing activities and a financial benefit to Giganews.”

Ron Yokubaitis, Co-CEO of Giganews, said that his company’s decision not to give in to Perfect 10 had resulted in a long and hard-fought battle, but the end result meant it had been worth it.

“We decided that it would be important to stand up to Perfect 10 and not be bullied by its abusive litigation tactics.  We were not going to settle this case just to avoid the risk of potentially catastrophic statutory damages in today’s crazy copyright world, a threat that unscrupulous plaintiffs like Perfect 10 use to extract unjust settlements from more timid companies,” he said.

“We took a stand for Usenet, for technology and online platforms, for the public, and for ultimate benefit of rational copyright law.  We were not just battling Perfect 10:  standing behind Perfect 10 – and even sharing in its oral argument at the court of appeals – was the Recording Industry Association of America(RIAA), which tried to argue that it was voicing the interests of small copyright holders.”

Giganews went on to thank several groups that gave it support during its battle with Perfect 10, including the Internet Infrastructure Coalition, EFF, and Public Knowledge. While Giganews will continue in the Usenet business, Perfect 10’s efforts to extract billions in damages from the provider have essentially developed into a suicide mission.

“With this decision, Perfect 10’s days as a copyright troll masquerading as a porn company are now finished,” Giganews said.

“The case now moves to its final stage to collect attorney’s fees from Perfect 10.  Giganews is seeking the appointment of a receiver to take charge of all of Perfect 10’s copyrights, trademarks, and domain names and to liquidate them in partial satisfaction of Giganews’ judgment against Perfect 10.”

The only area where Giganews failed to convince the court was in its request to add Perfect 10 founder Norman Zada to the verdict. The district court already denied that request and the panel at the court of appeal upheld that decision.

The full ruling is available here

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Deals of the Day (1-24-2017)

Deals of the Day (1-24-2017)

Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4 tablet may be available for a bit less than the list price these days, but if you’re looking for an even better deal on a 2-in-1 tablet with a detachable keyboard, Lenovo’s got you covered.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Miix 700 is a 12 inch tablet with a 2160 x 1440 pixel display, and an Intel Core M Skylake processor. And right now you can pick up a model with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage for $400.

Continue reading Deals of the Day (1-24-2017) at Liliputing.

Deals of the Day (1-24-2017)

Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4 tablet may be available for a bit less than the list price these days, but if you’re looking for an even better deal on a 2-in-1 tablet with a detachable keyboard, Lenovo’s got you covered.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Miix 700 is a 12 inch tablet with a 2160 x 1440 pixel display, and an Intel Core M Skylake processor. And right now you can pick up a model with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage for $400.

Continue reading Deals of the Day (1-24-2017) at Liliputing.

Deals of the Day (1-24-2017)

Deals of the Day (1-24-2017)

Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4 tablet may be available for a bit less than the list price these days, but if you’re looking for an even better deal on a 2-in-1 tablet with a detachable keyboard, Lenovo’s got you covered.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Miix 700 is a 12 inch tablet with a 2160 x 1440 pixel display, and an Intel Core M Skylake processor. And right now you can pick up a model with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage for $400.

Continue reading Deals of the Day (1-24-2017) at Liliputing.

Deals of the Day (1-24-2017)

Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4 tablet may be available for a bit less than the list price these days, but if you’re looking for an even better deal on a 2-in-1 tablet with a detachable keyboard, Lenovo’s got you covered.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Miix 700 is a 12 inch tablet with a 2160 x 1440 pixel display, and an Intel Core M Skylake processor. And right now you can pick up a model with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage for $400.

Continue reading Deals of the Day (1-24-2017) at Liliputing.

iOS 10.3 will be Apple’s first update to convert storage to APFS

Previously, APFS was only available as a beta in macOS Sierra.

After many years and at least one false start, Apple announced at WWDC last year that it would begin shipping a new, modern file system in 2017. Dubbed APFS (for Apple File System), it is designed to improve support for solid-state storage and encryption and to safeguard data integrity. When released, it will finally replace the nearly two-decade-old HFS+ filesystem that Apple has been tacking new features onto since 1998.

An early version of APFS was included in macOS Sierra as a beta for developers to experiment with, but it was intentionally limited in some important ways; it couldn't be used as a boot drive, it didn't support Fusion Drives, and you can't back up APFS volumes with Time Machine. We weren't expecting to hear more about a final APFS rollout until this year's WWDC, but it looks like Apple is getting ready to start the party already: according to the beta release notes for iOS 10.3, devices that are upgraded will automatically have their HFS+ file systems converted to APFS. From the release notes:

When you update to iOS 10.3, your iOS device will update its file system to Apple File System (APFS). This conversion preserves existing data on your device. However, as with any software update, it is recommended that you create a backup of your device before updating.

Apple's stated end goal is to perform an in-place file system conversion for all its currently supported devices, including all Macs, iPhones, iPads, iPods, Apple TVs, and Apple Watches. iOS 10.3 will provide some early information on how reliable that conversion will be.

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Interventions with parents push kids to pursue science classes

If parents know STEM careers are a good option, their kids focus more on STEM.

Ideally, we'd like some of the most talented students to get involved in STEM education—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. But many potentially talented students choose not to enroll in these courses early in their education, making it less likely that they can become adequately prepared for STEM careers. Figuring out how to get and keep students interested has been a big challenge, but a new study suggests that we might be targeting the wrong audience with some of our programs.

In a randomized controlled trial, when parents were given an intervention that emphasized the importance of STEM subjects in high school, their children were more likely to complete coursework in the area and pursue STEM-related careers. These findings suggest that educational policies that inform parents about the importance of math and science could help ensure that more students are prepared for futures in science.

The study recruited families in the state of Wisconsin between 1990 and 1991, when mothers were first pregnant. These families and their children were studied to pursue various research aims in the intervening decades. The study focused on a subset of this population that included 181 families, with students attending 108 different high schools in the state of Wisconsin. When these children were in 10th or 11th grade, the families were randomly assigned to a STEM intervention or a control one. The intervention came in the form of brochures and access to websites that emphasized the usefulness of STEM education. Eighty-nine percent of the parents reported remembering and using the intervention materials, and 75 percent of the teenagers confirmed that their parents had shared the material with them as well.

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001 Trolling is possibly the craziest movie ever made about the Internet

First trailer for low-budget indie offers bizarre hacking and sysadmin jokes.

It's incomprehensible. It's full of people with strange tongues and Wikipedia fixations. It contains underground troll gangs, inappropriate sexual material, and crazed bloggers. I'm going to go out on a limb and declare 001 Trolling the first great cult movie of 2017. It won't be out until May 4, but for now you can watch this trailer and let your eyeballs explode.

Here's the official plot summary of 001 Trolling:

Odyn, an unfulfilled aspiring rapper languishes as a security guard in Oakland Ca. By night he adopts the catfish proxy of a famous rapper in chat rooms to seduce girls as his girlfriend sleeps. Little does he know that his activity is being monitored by Richard Nullman of the world-renowned Internet trolling organization The Grid Gang (consisting of Richard and his two agoraphobic polyamourous lovers). Odyn is scouted, the planet is trolled, relationships explode, and the secret which unites them... could destroy them.

It's the latest low-budget movie from Collage Fossil Films, based in Oakland, California. Collage Fossil's previous flick, the hilariously bizarro Cosplay Fetish Battle Drones, was a naughty parody of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers that got the company in some trouble with overreaching IP lawyers in 2014. After YouTube took trailers of the movie down for infringement, the group fought back (with some help from the EFF) and now the trailer is back on YouTube because parody is fair use. I've been following the group's work since that time, and I'm glad to see they've turned their powers of mania to an exploration of online troll heroes.

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Ex-Goldman Sachs programmer found guilty, again, of source code theft

Court: It’s silly to let Sergey Aleynikov go free just because he stole digital files.

Enlarge (credit: Mario Tama / Getty Images News)

A New York state appellate court has restored the criminal conviction of an ex-Goldman Sachs programmer who was convicted of stealing trade secrets—high-frequency trading source code—before leaving his job in 2009.

“It would be incongruous to allow a defendant to escape criminal liability merely because he made a digital copy of the misappropriated source code instead of printing it onto a piece of paper,” the panel said, according to Bloomberg.

Sergey Aleynikov was convicted in federal court in 2010 on one count of stealing trade secrets and one count of transporting stolen property.

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Final Android Wear 2.0 preview brings iOS support for third-party apps

Google is expected to roll out a major update to its smartwatch operating system soon. But the company has been offering developer preview builds for months.
Now Google has released a fifth and final developer preview of Android Wear 2.0, including a n…

Final Android Wear 2.0 preview brings iOS support for third-party apps

Google is expected to roll out a major update to its smartwatch operating system soon. But the company has been offering developer preview builds for months.

Now Google has released a fifth and final developer preview of Android Wear 2.0, including a number of bug fixes and one major new feature: support for third-party apps for iOS users.

Google has allowed you to pair an Android Wear watch with an iPhone since 2015, but iOS users only got some of the features available to folks using an Android phone.

Continue reading Final Android Wear 2.0 preview brings iOS support for third-party apps at Liliputing.

Final Android Wear 2.0 preview brings iOS support for third-party apps

Google is expected to roll out a major update to its smartwatch operating system soon. But the company has been offering developer preview builds for months.
Now Google has released a fifth and final developer preview of Android Wear 2.0, including a n…

Final Android Wear 2.0 preview brings iOS support for third-party apps

Google is expected to roll out a major update to its smartwatch operating system soon. But the company has been offering developer preview builds for months.

Now Google has released a fifth and final developer preview of Android Wear 2.0, including a number of bug fixes and one major new feature: support for third-party apps for iOS users.

Google has allowed you to pair an Android Wear watch with an iPhone since 2015, but iOS users only got some of the features available to folks using an Android phone.

Continue reading Final Android Wear 2.0 preview brings iOS support for third-party apps at Liliputing.

Dealmaster: Don’t miss out before the big game—here are a bunch of 4K TV deals

Plus savings on games, desktop PCs, VPN software, and more.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a bundle of new deals to share. Most of our featured selection today is full of specials on TVs that you can get before the big game. Now you can get a 50-inch Vizio P-Series 4K LED TV plus an Android Tablet remote and a $300 Dell gift card for just $999 if you order by January 25. There are also savings on other Vizio, Samsung, and LG TVs, so you have numerous options if you're in the market for a new TV.

Check out the full list of deals below.

Featured

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