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Month: October 2010

Name-checked in the Seanad

Published October 22, 2010

So, after I posted this post about Aslan’s imaginary illegal downloads, someone on Twitter linked to this comment by Senator Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail), in the Seanad the next day, repeating the incorrect Aslan factoid:

Sen. Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail): There is a perception that the big five record companies, all international companies, have been ripping off the consumer for many years. I do not want to be seen as an apologist for the music industry, but at the lower level I can give a specific example to highlight the impact of illegal downloading on Aslan, an Irish band. It has sold 6,000 copies of its current album, but there have been 22,000 illegal downloads. […] Why must we wait for a High Court judgment to be made before we introduce relevant legislation?

It appears a few people, Adam Beecher for one, got in touch with the Senator by email. To my surprise, a couple of days later, I got some Twitter messages telling me that I’d been mentioned in the Seanad! Indeed, here it is:

Sen. Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail): Last week on the Order of Business I raised an issue relating to illegal downloading of music on the Internet which followed on a court case which the major international record companies had lost that had been taken the previous day. I asked the Leader what possible legislation could be introduced to address this gap, and I am repeating the request. I have had quite a significant amount of response to the comments I made last week, specifically from persons who state that the figures quoted in my report, and also the figures quoted in the court case to defend the record companies’ position, are inaccurate, and I was asked by a number of those who emailed me to correct the record. Having investigated this further – I recommend to the House that those who are interested log on to taint.org – there is no doubt that the figures that have been quoted to support the court case, which was subsequently lost, are not accurate. It related to the group Aslan. I do not want to delay the House on this other than to correct the record in that I put the figures as I had received them in good faith and such has been the response to the comments I made in the House last week that I feel obliged to correct the record and state that there is no doubt but that the figures that have been used are, at best, suspect.

It would be important if the Leader could have the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation, Deputy Batt O’Keeffe, come to the House to give some indication of his proposals because the music industry is currently lobbying in this House and in the other House to have legislation changed to benefit it. However, there is a wider view that illegal downloading will continue irrespective of what happens, the record companies are now on the defensive and there are other alternatives that could be brought forward such as licensing those who wish to download. In that context, I would be interested in the Leader’s response.

A few comments in response:

  • Credit is due to Senator Mooney in that he admitted that he’d been misled, and corrected the record in that regard.

  • it’s amazing to see that the democratic process has opened up to this degree. I would have never expected to have this degree of input to our elected representatives without having to go through more traditional channels (face-to-face meetings etc.)

  • Finally: ‘The music industry is currently lobbying in this House and in the other House to have legislation changed to benefit it’. That is very, very worrying. Indeed, suzybie noted on Twitter:

@jmason not sure if you caught it but I saw Willie K and his mates entering Dáíl last Wednesday evening. FF backbenchers were being met

McGarr solicitors have been in touch with the relevant Ministers requesting that Digital Rights Ireland be included in any discussions regarding legislative change. This will be one to keep an eye on.

Links for 2010-10-18

Published October 18, 2010

Irish Times Letter re EMI v UPC

Published October 18, 2010

Submitted via email to their letters page. This may be a bit too long for the format, but hey. Enjoy.

Madam, — Commentary in this paper and elsewhere has given the impression that Mr. Justice Charleton’s judgement on the EMI v. UPC case was a poor result for EMI and the other record companies represented. This is not necessarily the case. While UPC may not yet have to implement “three strikes”, there are many things to worry the Irish internet user in the judgement.

Mr. Justice Charleton states that he is satisfied that the business of the recording companies is being devastated by piracy, entirely based on evidence submitted by the record companies and IRMA. One of these assertions was that over 20,000 illegal downloads of an “Aslan” album had been “traced” — but no details of the methodology of this “tracing” has been produced.

Third-party attempts to reproduce this figure indicate that it is probable that an extremely naive approach was taken in this testing — the putative copies of the album available to download, and their large download figures, are in reality a lure used by criminals to persuade unwitting victims to provide their credit card details to fraudulent websites.

Worryingly, this flawed evidence has already been represented as fact in the Seanad by FF senator Paschal Mooney.

Other studies cited in the judgement have been criticised widely elsewhere, including by the US Government Accountability Office in its April 2010 report to the US Congress.

Mr. Justice Charleton goes on to suggest that all internet access from UPC (and presumably other ISPs) be filtered through a piracy-detection system. One wonders what the many companies who currently run internet-based services from Ireland would make of this proposal.

The government now seems keen to rush in and implement the filtering and blocking systems requested by IRMA and the music companies, as Mr. Justice Charleton recommends, or possibly even to give hand-outs to the music industry to compensate them, as IRMA demands. One hopes that more technical expertise will be brought to bear on the supposed “evidence” before this happens.

Yours, etc., Justin Mason

Links for 2010-10-14

Published October 14, 2010

Links for 2010-10-13

Published October 13, 2010

Aslan’s hard times, from the UPC judgement

Published October 11, 2010

Oh dear. Quoting Mr Justice Charleton’s judgement in favour of UPC vs. EMI, Sony, et al:

‘This scourge of internet piracy strongly affects Irish musicians, most of whom pay tax in Ireland. ‘Aslan’ is a distinguished Irish group which has a loyal fan base; but not all of them believe in paying for music.Previous sales of their albums were excellent, about 35,000 per album, and in respect of one called “Platinum Collection”, a three CD box set, 50,000 copies were sold. More recently, an album called “Uncased” was released and only 6,000 copies were sold.Perhaps, it might be thought, the album was not popular and did not sell well? In contrast, a search was made to see how many illegal downloads had been made on the internet from that album, and 22,000 were traced.’

Aslan, eh?

So, that would be about the same figure as EMI quoted in a press statement in July 2009, which ‘Gambra’ on the thumped.com boards thoroughly debunked at the time:

‘I’ve just been listening to the first minute or two of this and have done a mere 10 minutes of googling to try verify the claim of 25,000 downloads. The EMI press statement mentioned that they’ve tracked that amount of downloads “through Torrents Nova and Pirate Bay alone.” The first problem with that is that there’s no such site as Torrents Nova (I presumed they meant mininova but Aslan gets zero hits over there) but never mind, we’ll carry on. Next I search for ever possible permutation for downloads of the new Aslan album and I kept getting the same result which is “Aslan – Uncase’d (2009) KompletlyWyred Dhz.inc” which was uploaded to thepiratebay. However this file only has a grand total of 9 seeders and 6 leechers and has been alive since the 26th of June. There’s no way of telling how many times it’s been leeched exactly but even if it was 6 new leechers every day it’d be a total of 108 downloads. It is fair to assume that only 9 of these bothered to seed back so I’d say the total is right.

Wondering still where the hell they got their mystical 25,000 total from I just searched for “Aslan Uncased” and was surprised to see 5 links to torrents of the album in the first two pages of results. However 4 of the 5 just link back to the one on TPB with 9 seeders. The 5th is where I think they got their mystical 25,000 total from:

http://www.nowtorrents.com/torrents/aslan-uncased.html

This is the 7th result you get on google for the album title and when you click it you actually get “No Matches were found” but up at the top are FAKE results that are actually just ad links. You could search for anything and you’ll get those exact same four ad results.

http://www.nowtorrents.com/torrents/gambra-thumped.html

If you refresh the totals change each time so it’s safe to say they found this link by googling the name, added up the total of listed downloads they got (which is totally random) and are using that to moan about their loss of sales. Incredible.’

Indeed, according to the site, an album called ‘Justin Mason on the nose flute’ has been downloaded 24,752 times — I never knew! Where’s my cheque?

Some quality facts and figures from EMI there, I suspect.

Links for 2010-10-11

Published October 11, 2010

Links for 2010-10-08

Published October 8, 2010

  • NAMAland : ‘At NAMAland we like to look on the bright side. OK, the downside of NAMA is that it’s costing you €54 billion — the upside is that you now own some of the best (and worst) properties in Dublin. So grab your phone, put on your tophat and enjoy your new role as a property tycoon with our augmented reality tour of NAMAland. Remember, we-are-where-we-are, there’s no point playing the blame game, we were all living beyond our means and it was like that when we got here…’ Excellent! a Layar Augmented Reality layer for Layar which lets you see properties in Dublin owned by NAMA, the National Asset Management Agency
    (tags: nama funny ouch augmented-reality layar dublin ireland)

Links for 2010-10-07

Published October 7, 2010

  • Web service – current time zone for a city? – Stack Overflow : ‘a web service of some sort (or any other way) to pull a current time zone settings for a (US) city. For the parts of the country that don’t follow the Daylight Saving Time and basically jump timezones when everyone else is switching summer/winter time… I don’t fancy creating own database of the places that don’t follow DST. Is there a way to pull this data on demand?’ earthtools.org seems the closest thing
    (tags: dst daylight-savings local timezones iso8601 dates times web-services http)

  • Facebook now does export : ‘we’ve built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you’ve ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information. If you want a copy of the information you’ve put on Facebook for any reason, you can click a link and easily get a copy of all of it in a single download.’ excellent
    (tags: facebook export data control privacy personal-data)

Links for 2010-10-06

Published October 6, 2010

Links for 2010-10-04

Published October 4, 2010