Random Collection of News Items. It's been a busy time on the battlefield against digital piracy. Here's some notes from the front lines:

In response to a recent idiotic court ruling, Congress passes and the President signs a do not call registry law -- in one day! Yes, dear readers, what you've always suspected is true: the politicians can quickly make things happen when they really want to. Now if they can just turn their attention to the rest of the piracy problem.

California's Governor Davis signs a harsh anti-spam law. Nice going, but is it too little, too late, for the Governor who admits that in the last 5 years he's fallen out of touch with the common man? Hey, Davis, here's a hint: spam from your state got out of control under your watch.

The State Department shuts down its computers to stop a virus spreading and wiping out a database of 78,000 suspected terrorists. We'll probably do a full story on this one, but suffice it to say that kids writing worms are not innocent pranksters, but dangerous criminals putting all of our lives at risk.

The founders of KaZaA start a free phone service. Although it's sure to tee off the telcos, it's not piracy and goes to show that pirates could live honest lives if they chose to.

Musicmatch launched a competing service to iTunes. The winds of change are still little more than a mild breeze, but the decision to sell tunes, this time to Windows users, at 99 cents a pop is a welcome development. SPN predicts the correct price point will eventually be 25 cents, but that's another subject entirely.

Go Daddy Go. Go. Go! The fallout continues from Verisign's piracy of mis-spelled domain names using their new "Site Finder" service. Go Daddy Software, a significant registrar of domains, slapped Verisign with a suit Monday alleging that Verisign is abusing its position and gaining unfair competitive advantage by intercepting traffic. Go Daddy has put their money where their mouth is, recognizing that Verisign intercepting what doesn't belong to them is morally no different than pirate raiders chasing down merchantmen on the high seas. SPN wishes them luck and godspeed. For more information, see GoDaddy.com.

Pirate vs. Pirate? You Decide. SPN was outraged recently to learn that the once venerable Verisign had gone buccaneer, deciding to redirect traffic from misspelled domain queries to their own commercial interests. Each day, millions of people accidentally misspell a domain name, and many of those accidental typos are pirated by typosquatters. Then along comes Verisign, abusing their position as the official registrar of .com and .net, as the Blackbeard of all typosquatters, outrageously siphoning off confused consumers for themselves. (Note to the parents of the engineers at Verisign: next time teach your little geniuses the following: "just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.")

Well, dear readers, one ill turn deserves another. Verisign has been slapped with, get this, a $100 million antitrust lawsuit by the purveyors of Netster.com. Netster has made a name for itself by, among other things, registering thousands of expired domain names to push the traffic and link equity of those domains into their own back-door search service. Verisign's designs on the typo market threaten Netster's business model, if you can call it that, bringing us to this spectacle of litigation. Can't we all just get along?

Typosquatting needs to stop. Now.

Zietgeist in Brief. Say what you will about the RIAA's wave of lawsuits, there can be no doubt that they have raised the awareness level of the issue of digital piracy. The lawsuit has taken piracy from techie stories on the second page of newspapers' business sections to the front page, where the issue belongs. Thankfully, the spirit of the times are a changin'. SPN fervently hopes that this new awareness will spill over to the other forms of piracy faced by business online, such as pagejacking, typosquatting, search engine fraud and unauthorized pop-overs -- all of which need to stop. Now.

From The We Must Be Living In An Alternate-Reality Universe Department. A pinhead district court judge ruled yesterday that trademark and copyright rules don't apply to spyware activities from companies like Gator and WhenU. In the case brought by U-Haul, Judge Gerald B. Lee ruled that

Ultimately, it's the computer user who controls how windows are displayed on the computer desktop.(Hagerty, James R. "Judge's Ruling on Pop-Up Ads Is a Blow to Web-Site Operators." The Wall Street Journal (08 Aug. 2003) p. A3.)

Did we just step through to the other side of the looking glass just because it's technology? Before the judge declared "off with their heads" to publishers online, he should have considered the following variation to his ruling:

Ultimately, it's the intellectual property owner who controls how their content is displayed and transmitted on the computer desktop. (How SPN would have said it.)

Let us clue you in on how things work, Judge Lee. Spyware retransmits copyrighted content and trademarks back to their central servers in order to determine the context in which to serve their ad. Sure, the consumer may have given the spyware permission to alter their desktop, but the copyright holder sure as hell didn't give permission for their content to be retransmitted and used in an unauthorized fashion. That, dear readers, is the essence of the copyright violation, and that's also why SPN vigorously condemns Judge Lee's ruling. Spyware must stop. Now.

In the news today.The RIAA filed 261 lawsuits today against so-called "major offenders." Those who shared 1,000 songs or more via Peer to Peer file sharing networks such as KaZaA and Morpheus are about to find out just how serious the law is against willful copyright infringement. By focusing on the big time kilo-pirates and simultaneously announcing an amnesty program for small time crooks, the RIAA attempted to balance draconian enforcement with a touch of reason. SPN wishes the RIAA and its leader, Cary Sherman, godspeed and success in protecting their property. Show them no mercy, Cary. They didn't show you any.

Reader Feedback. Below is a letter submitted to SPN by someone calling themselves "Betty Boop"

If i can't download music, then i'm not going to wanna buy cds any more, i d'l the music to see if want to by cds, so why don't you take that and shove it... cuz you don't even understand crap ("Ms. Betty Boop" (5 Sep 2003).)

Editor's Reply: It doesn't surprise us that pirates resort to name-calling to make up for the general weakness of their arguments. Insults over ideas. But we do appreciate the directness of "Betty's" rant; even with the invective, it's morally clearer than some of the psuedo-intellectual babbling that comes out of pro-piracy groups like the Electronic Freedom Foundation, filled with smart people who should know better.

To respond to the specific point, SPN believes that the RIAA and the music industry in general have utterly botched the opportunity presented to them by digital distribution. The industry has acted as a greed-ridden cartel, abusing both consumers and distributors. $20 for a CD? What a joke. But, "Betty," that doesn't give you a license to steal. You can't open a box of Corn Flakes at the supermarket to see if you want to buy it, and music is no different. But at least you are willing to pay for music you like, which is far better than most, and the music industry needs to find a sane way to let consumers like you sample music without opening themselves up to endless piracy. And we admit, by the way, that we don't know crap, but we're doing the best we can. Thanks for your letter.

From the What Took You So Long Department.The Universal Music Group announced today that it will cut the suggested retail price of virtually all of its CD's to $12.98. The move is a dramatic strategy shift, since of late many movie DVD's have become far less expensive than music CD's that were starting to encroach on the $20 territory. CD's were plainly just too expensive, with online piracy delivering the final blow, forcing a reconsideration of business strategy. SPN applauds Universal's bold and industry-changing move. Universal's Chairman and CEO summarized the strategy:

We're going to reinvigorate the record business in North America. Were making a very bold, strategic move to bring people back to music stores. -- Doug Morris, Universal Music (Smith, Ethan. "Universal Slashes CD Prices in Bid to Revive Music Industry" The Wall Street Journal (4 Sep. 2003). pB1.)

SPN wishes the music industry had come to this conclusion years ago, but nothing can excuse the orgy of theft that has characterized the online music sharing community since Napster's promethian gift to the masses enabling a copyright holocaust. Hopefully this dramatic change will finally spur the record and movie industries to develop sustainable business models that are consumer-friendly. For the entertainment industry, that's the best way to stop piracy now.

In the news today. We had the distinct pleasure this morning of listening to an interview on NPR with Mark Ishikawa, the CEO and Founder of BayTSP, a copyright and intellectual property protection firm. One of BayTSP's activities is to track down P2P file share pirates and send their ISP's takedown notices under the DMCA. This has earned BayTCP the eternal enmity of the P2P community, and, according to Ishikawa, spawned attacks against him personally, such as posting on the web his home address, photos of his home, personal information, etc.

What amazes all of us at SPN is the shocking attitude of pirates that leads them to actually attempt to retaliate against Mr. Ishikawa for doing his job under the law. What's next, pirates of the world, a severed horse head under the sheets of Ishikawa's bed, Godfather-style? If pirates, when caught, ceased the activity and said "ooops, I didn't know what I was doing was wrong," it would be one thing, but these digital miscreants behave as if they have a divine right to steal, and some have the nerve to enforce their beliefs with mafia-style intimidation tactics. It's incredible, and it needs to stop. Now.