Judge David G. Larimer, presiding in Rochester, New York, has denied an RIAA application for default judgment on the ground that the RIAA's evidence was insufficient, in that it contained no details of actual downloads or distributions, and no sufficient evidence that defendant was in fact Kazaa user "heavyjeffmc@KaZaA". The decision (pdf) concluded that "there are significant issues of fact regarding the identification of the defendant from his alleged "online media distribution system" username". (In case you're unfamiliar with the term "online media distribution system", that's because it is a term the RIAA coined 4 years ago to describe p2p file sharing accounts in its lawsuits; the term is not known to have been used by anyone else anywhere else.) In August a similar RIAA default judgment motion was denied on the ground that the pleadings failed to allege sufficient factual details supporting a claim of copyright infringement, in a San Diego, California, case, Interscope v. Rodriguez.

The Slashdot and Groklaw communities were so helpful in preparing for the deposition of the RIAA's "expert" witness, Dr. Doug Jacobson, we thought we'd come back and ask for your thoughts on what documents and/or data to request from the RIAA's 'investigator', MediaSentry, Inc. The documents we have so far are just printouts, which were used at Dr. Jacobson's deposition, specifically exhibits 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14. Of course we have some ideas of our own about what to demand, but we want to leave no stone unturned. For the technical minded among you, this is your chance to be a part of bringing the RIAA's litigation campaign down.

The Interscope v. Rodriguez decision dismissing the RIAA's boilerplate complaint, and the $9250-per-song-file verdict in Capitol v. Thomas, have inspired some new dismissal motions in RIAA cases. In Charleston, South Carolina, Catherine Njuguna has moved to dismiss on the basis of the legal insufficiency of the RIAA's complaint and on constitutional grounds due to the excessive damages sought by the RIAA, while in Brooklyn, New York, MS victim Rae J Schwartz has moved to dismiss based solely on the complaint's failure to state a claim under Rodriguez and the Supreme Court decision, Bell Atlantic v. Twombly.

So it seems like the new discussion-threading system (aka "D2", according to the preferences page) no longer works for me.

I had just gotten used to it -- in particular, being able to click on comments to expand or collapse them -- and suddenly at some point this afternoon I reloaded a page and the whole thing just went away. I'm back to the regular discussion style, where clicking on the title of another user's post will open that post in a separate page.

However, I still have the new style selected in my preferences. I'm just curious whether this is a global problem or something specific to my network or configuration. I've tried disabling AdBlock and some other relevant FF extensions but no dice.

Anyone else noticing anything amiss?

Jammie Thomas has filed a motion to set aside the $222,000 verdict obtained against her by the RIAA, based on allegations she infringed $23.76 worth of song files. Her motion papers (pdf) argue that the verdict is excessive and in violation of the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution, and should be reduced to $150 or less, or a new trial ordered. (See, e.g. UMG v. Lindor). It has been reported that the RIAA issued a statement that "Thomas [is] not taking responsibility for her actions, and .... they want to resolve the case in a "fair and reasonable" fashion. It is unfortunate that the defendant continues to avoid responsibility for her actions....". In my experience that is RIAA-speak for "after the verdict we have tried to make a settlement with her, but she wouldn't meet our terms".

This feels like a mega-spam entry, and I'm very self conscious about posting it, but I'm excited about this and I wanted to share . . .

I just published my third book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives. I mention it here because it's all about growing up in the 70s, and coming of age in the 80s as part of the D&D/BBS/video game/Star Wars figures generation, and I think a lot of Slashdot readers will relate to the stories in it.

I published a few of the stories on my blog, including Blue Light Special. It's about the greatest challenge a ten year-old could face in 1982: save his allowance, or buy Star Wars figures?

After our corduroy pants and collared shirts and Trapper Keepers and economy packs of pencils and wide-ruled paper were piled up in our cart, our mom took our three year-old sister with her to the make-up department to get shampoo and whatever moms buy in the make-up department, and my brother and I were allowed to go to the toy department.

"Can I spend my allowance?" I said.

"If that's what you want to do," my mom said, another entry in a long string of unsuccessful passive/aggressive attempts to encourage me to save my money for . . . things you save money for, I guess. It was a concept that was entirely alien to me at nine years old.

"Keep an eye on Jeremy," she said.

"Okay," I said. As long as Jeremy stood right at my side and didn't bother me while I shopped, and as long as he didn't want to look at anything of his own, it wouldn't be a problem.

I held my brother's hand as we tried to walk, but ended up running, across the store, past a flashing blue light special, to the toy department. Once there, we wove our way past the bicycles and board games until we got to the best aisle in the world: the one with the Star Wars figures.

I'm really proud of this book, and the initial feedback on it has been overwhelmingly positive. I've been reluctant to mention it here, because of the spam issue, but I honestly do think my stories will appeal to Slashdotters.

After the disaster with O'Reilly on Just A Geek, I've decided to try this one entirely on my own, so I'm responsible for the publicity, the marketing, the shipping, and . . . well, everything. If this one fails, it will be because of me, not because a marketing department insisted on marketing it as something it's not.

Of course, I hope I can claim the same responsibility if (when?) it finds its audience . . . which would be awesome.

So I recently ran across a new site, courtesy of the fine folks at MetaFilter: Rememble. In a nutshell, it's a sort of 'digital scrapbooking' site. It describes itself as "a 'washing line' for your digital bits and pieces. Thread together texts, photos, videos, sounds, scribbles, scans, notes, tweets... so they're not drifting in a digital wasteland."

As a compulsive digitizer, I'll go first and say that it sounds great. There are a lot of services that provide the ability to save little text snippets for later (Google's Google Notebook, when coupled with the appropriate Firefox Addon, comes to mind), and Flickr is the gold standard for digital photo organization and sharing, and there are similar single-media sites for other purposes. However, there's a distinct lack of a single site that allows you to collect, view, organize, scrapbook, and share various types of digital media in a cohesive format. And that's a darn shame: as more people get online and involved in modern interactive services, as they get more of their lives online, it's only natural that they'll want to be able to save parts of it for later, just like they do in the physical world. (And, of course, being virtual lets you do things in an online notebook that you can't easily do in a dead-tree one, like suddenly decide to view all your clippings by date instead of by subject.)

Unfortunately, Rememble's execution -- at least at the moment -- falls flat. For a site that treads on being almost postmodern, its approach seems driven by a desire to create a vast silo of exploitable content. First major gaffe: you can't see *anything* without registering for an account. That's right, nothing. So let's say you set up an account, dump a lot of stuff into it, and then want to share it with some friends? Nope, sorry, they all have to sign up for accounts. This is such a major, deal-breaking limitation, it's hard not to immediately think of one of those ubiquitous "FAILURE" image macros. I can only hope that this is some sort of limitation due to the service being new -- I mean, they can't really be that stupid, can they?

Similarly, you can't deep-link to content that you upload. That's right; you can't embed things you upload to Rememble on your blog. While this isn't as obvious a death-wish as the lack of sharing ability, it's potentially more damaging. Flickr succeeded in its early days mainly because it became popular with bloggers looking for an alternative to services like ImageShack that didn't suck quite so badly. Flickr offered one-click tools for resizing an image and embedding it into a blog post. It was slick, people loved it, and they got a community of users rather quickly.

Beyond that, there doesn't seem to easily be a way of getting content *out* of Rememble once you've gotten it in. This bothers me, personally, although it may not be the sort of thing that a casual, non-backup-obsessed user might think of. (Though, in my opinion, they should.) A service like Rememble could, over time, end up being a significant repository of information and digital relics; having your Rememble store disappear would be like having your family scrapbooks torched.

After taking a casual look at Rememble, and comparing it to a successful service like Flickr, a number of concrete steps come to mind for, if not actually ensuring the success of a community-oriented "Web 2.0" media-sharing site, at least making it slightly less prone to sucking:

1) Sign-ins should only be required for content creators, never viewers. Even a free, one-minute signup procedure is one minute too long to expect random people I might want to share content with to go through. It's unnecessary and borders on arrogant.

2) Prohibiting blogging and direct linking may seem like a good idea, but it's not. Really. The people who are going to want to blog and direct-link are also the ones who are going to make or break your service. Don't alienate them 30 seconds after they upload their first bit of media. Yes, it may burn you to spend money on bandwidth so your users can use you like ImageShack, the Internet's cheap village whore, but chin up: everybody has to start somewhere.

3) Expose your APIs, and encourage third-party development. (To be fair, I'm not sure what Rememble is doing with their APIs; maybe they expose them and just aren't obvious about it.) Use standard interchange formats whenever possible. Since exposed APIs are considered one of the keys to useful, modern web services, they really need to get this right. Luckily, Flickr has a good model. Follow it. Also: Let users *export* content, not just import it. Acting like the NSA, hoovering up stuff and never letting anything slip back out, makes people justifiably nervous.

4) Provide a way for backups. Also: nobody likes commitment. Don't expect users to trust you, your datacenter, your RAID array, or your backup strategy. For all we know, you're running this thing on a spare server that your boss could repossess at any time. Provide users an easy way to grab a snapshot of everything they've created (a big tarball of media files and XML metadata) for their own peace of mind. Also, people like knowing that they have a way out if things go sour.

If Rememble took those four steps, they would probably have a service that I'd use right now -- at least for trivial stuff. From there, the sky's the limit.

Of 'second tier' features, an ability to encrypt content using an open-source, client-side applet (so that it gets encrypted by me, not by the server on the far end) would be nice, particularly when you're talking about automatically archiving text messages and other communications that may be sensitive now but nice to have later -- perhaps this could be offered as a premium service? If you do it right, with full auditability, you might even get corporate interest.

What really would make a service like Rememble outstanding are the interfaces. Imagine plugging a service like this into your SMS/text-messaging service from your phone, your email reader, and your IM client (archiving both conversations and status messages): you'd have a single online archive of all your communications. Privacy nightmare? Quite possibly. But it would also be handy; no more trying to remember how somebody sent you a bit of information. Plug it into your address book, so that you could cross-reference other people's online identities, and you'd be able to see all communications with a particular person over time, regardless of medium. Or run a quick search and you could see all the people you discussed a particular topic with.

I find the possibilities for a Rememble-like service pretty exciting; for someone who really likes compiling and managing information, it's just oozing with potential. And more than anything else, that's why Rememble is painful: it takes something that should be mind-blowing and renders it in a form that's lame and unimaginative; without an obvious grasp of what web services are all about.

A federal judge in Tampa, Florida, has ruled that an RIAA defendant's counterclaim against the record companies for conspiracy to use unlicensed investigators, access private computer records without permission, and commit extortion, may move forward. The Court also sustained claims for violations of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as a claim under Florida law for deceptive and unfair trade practices. The decision (pdf) by Judge Richard A. Lazzara in UMG v. DelCid rejected, in its entirety, the RIAA's assertion of "Noerr Pennington" immunity, since that defense does not apply to "sham litigations", and Ms. Del Cid alleges that the RIAA's cases are "sham".

Several weeks ago it was discovered that a California federal judge, in rejecting an RIAA application for default judgment, had dismissed the RIAA's standard complaint for failure to state a claim, calling it "conclusory" "boilerplate" "speculation" in Interscope v. Rodriguez. In the wake of that decision, a Queens, New York, woman being sued in Brooklyn federal court, Rae J Schwartz, has told the Court that she is making a motion to dismiss the complaint in her case, Elektra v. Schwartz. This is the first post-Interscope challenge to the RIAA's boilerplate, of which we are aware. This is the same case in which the RIAA had sent a letter to the Judge falsely indicating that AOL had "confirmed that defendant owned an internet access account through which copyrighted sound recordings were downloaded and distributed". Ms. Schwartz suffers from Multiple Sclerosis and has never engaged in file sharing, but the RIAA has pressed the case against her.

A few days ago it was reported that, in view of the RIAA's one-month delay in paying the $68,685.00 attorneys fee award in Capitol v. Foster, and its lawyers' failure to respond to Ms. Foster's lawyer's email, Ms. Foster filed a motion for entry of judgment so that she could go ahead with judgment enforcement proceedings. In response to that motion the RIAA submitted a statement that it had no objection to entry of judgment, and intimated that it thought there would be an automatic stay on enforcement of the judgment, and that it would ultimately file an appeal. After seeing that, Ms. Foster's lawyer has filed a motion for the Court to require the RIAA to post $210,000 in security to cover the past and future attorneys fees and costs which are expected to be incurred.

Can it be that the RIAA, or the "Big 4" record companies it represents, are short on funds? It turns out that despite the Judge's order, entered a month ago, telling them to pay Debbie Foster $68,685.23 in attorneys fees, in Capitol v. Foster, they have failed to make payment, and Ms. Foster has now had to ask the Court to enter Judgment, so that she can commence "post judgment collection proceedings". According to Ms. Foster's motion papers (pdf), her attorneys received no response to their email inquiry about payment. Perhaps the RIAA should ask their lawyers for a loan.

UMG Recordings, part of the Universal music group, one of the "Big 4" record companies, has brought suit against an eBay reseller of Promo CD's (pdf), in UMB v. Augusto, in California. The defendant, whose legal team includes the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is fighting back (pdf), claiming that his sales of the CD's are lawful under the "first sale" doctrine under Section 109 of the Copyright Act (17 USC 109), and counterclaiming against UMG for sending out false notices under the DMCA (Copyright Act Section 512).

[A while ago I mentioned the ClearCom brand of headset intercoms in a post. These are commonly used in theaters and TV studios, in order to let everyone backstage / in the control room talk to everyone else. They're a pretty simple "party line" system (at least the 3-pin XLR type most commonly encountered) but are, IMO, a neat application of analog electronics. I got a few emails about the post, asking for more information on how they worked, and in responding to them I ended up typing out a fairly long document based on my best understanding.

In particular, people seemed curious about a feature of the ClearCom system, which allows the person at the "master box" (in a theater, it's usually the Stage Manager or their Assistant) to remotely unlock the PTT switches of everyone else on the line. This is nice if someone else has locked their mic on and is breathing into it, or if you have people whose hands are too full to unlock their own mic, or you don't want to bother them while they're doing something critical -- e.g., camera operators, stagehands, etc.

Don't assume anything I describe here is correct. It's been a few years since I've worked with any ClearCom gear, and I'm not an EE by trade anyway. I'm about 75% certain that the general principles described below are correct, but I wouldn't swear by any of it. Okay?]

The unlock feature isn't really a hack, it's an actual feature of the ClearCom system, by design.

I'll try to describe what I know about the ClearComs, but really the best explanation I've ever seen, and where I learned most of this, is from this page:

http://www.rcrowley.com/comclone/Project.htm
http://www.rcrowley.com/comclone/CircuitDesc.htm
http://www.rcrowley.com/comclone/default.htm

Basically it's a page on how to construct ClearCom-compatible (he calls them "ComClone") intercoms.

Basically ... it works something like this. The ClearComs use three-pin XLR (balanced audio microphone cable) as a physical medium. There is one master box, which plugs into the wall, and then there are many portable beltpacks, which you daisy-chain off of the master. In terms of topology it's kinda similar to old coax-based ethernet, only in addition to the shared-medium data line, you also have a Vcc and Gnd wire.

But instead of coax, you're using balanced audio cable, so you have two signal wires and then a shield wire running around them. One of the signal wires is used in the clearcom setup for power, another is used for (unbalanced!) audio, and then ground is used for a shared power/signal ground.

The master box feeds DC onto the power wire, and this is how all the devices on the system get power -- this way the belt packs don't need batteries. I think it's like 24VDC or so. The master box also terminates the audio signal wire, with some fixed resistance. I think it's like 600 ohms or something (don't quote me on that, though). And it grounds the third (ground) pin.

Each beltpack transmits audio onto the signal wire, by acting as a variable AC CURRENT source (not a variable voltage source, as you might suspect). Remember that the audio line is terminated at one point, back at the master console. So V = IR, with a fixed R (the termination resistor), means there's a fluctuating voltage signal.

In order to receive audio, each beltpack acts as some very very high resistance in between the audio signal and ground, and basically measures the voltage change. Since each beltpack acts as some really high impedance (up in the megohm range, I think), and the audio is transmitted as a fluctuating current through the terminating resistor, which is much, much smaller than the internal impedance of the beltpack receivers, you can put a lot of beltpacks on a circuit without diminishing the audio signal. The audio is basically right around "line level" (few hundred mV).

Also, and this is fairly important -- all the audio parts of the transmitters and receivers (which I think are opamps) are AC coupled; they're isolated with capacitors. This is important, because the system imposes a DC bias on the audio wire in order to send signals.

There are two types of control signals that the system allows for. One is the "attention" signal, which makes a light flash on the beltpacks, so that you can wake up someone who might have their headset off and get them to come on line. The other signal is the "hangup" signal, which causes the PTT switch on the remote stations to release.

Both of these functions can only be initiated from the master console (the one with the power supply in it). Basically, when you want to send 'attention,' you press a button, and the box imposes a DC bias equal to about half of the supply voltage on the signal line. The belt packs have a bright LED that goes on in response to this. I don't know exactly how it's triggered but there are a lot of ways you could do it (zeners, etc.)

For the other signal, the hangup signal, there's an even higher DC bias imposed, I think. (Maybe just Vcc, assuming that the attention signal is Vcc/2?) It could conceivably be a negative DC bias with respect to ground, or something else (I've never actually measured it), but it's some other kind of DC bias on the signal line.

The beltpacks all have PTT switches on them that are non-mechanical. When you press and hold one, it works like a PTT. When you press it twice, quickly, it "locks" and you can talk without holding it down. They are designed so that if the person at the master console presses the unlock button, the belt packs will unlock the PTT in response to the signal. Honestly I'm not sure exactly how the beltpacks accomplish this, since I've never reverse-engineered one; I'm pretty sure though that the home-made ComClones *won't* do it, so I think it's a fairly complex analog circuit. (The easiest way would be with a latching relay, but I'm pretty sure that this is not how the beltpacks work, I think it's all solid-state.)

Since the audio signal and these DC signaling pulses are on the same wire, whenever the person at the master console uses one of these features -- attention or unlock -- you can hear it in the headset as a "clunking" sound.

That's about all there is to them. There are a few competing designs for simple party-line intercoms to ClearCom's; Telex is the biggest alternative, and I think they may do something that allows for balanced audio (the ClearComs will hum if you get them too close to a power line, which is a problem in the theater where you're using them alongside horrifically noisy SCR-based lighting dimmers) but they're essentially the same idea.

They also make two-channel versions that use 4-pin XLR cable, and basically just have two signal lines, so you can have two "subnets" (say, you can put all your backstage crew on channel A, and all your front-of-house crew on chan B, so the FOH people don't hear the backstage chatter if they don't want to, but the stage manager, sitting at the master console, can talk to everyone or even bridge the two groups if he/she wants).

More modern systems made in the last 5-10 years are digital and/or allow for multiple channels on top of each other by using frequency modulation techniques; wireless ones are also big. However, the 2-wire (plus ground) ClearCom system is the de facto standard in many theaters and production facilities, and in many cases the buildings have been wired for them (plus you can run them through unused channels in XLR "snakes", etc.).

Anyway hope this made sense. I'll probably copy this email and put it in my /. journal, and perhaps some other knowledgeable folks will correct any mistakes I've made.

--
The body of the above message, excepting material quoted or reproduced from other sources, and specifically excluding any and all attachments unless specifically noted, is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License Version 1.2, with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts an no Back-Cover Texts, and may be copied, distributed and/or modified subject to the terms of the License at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.txt

If anyone sees anything in this description that's wrong, please feel free to correct me. Back when I worked in theaters more frequently, I had a variety of little interface boxes, that would convert from ClearCom intercom connections, to balanced line-level audio. My favorite use of these was to record a performance, keeping the backstage headset audio as an alternate audio track. (Generally I'd record them to the linear audio tracks on a VHS tape, and put the house-reinforcement audio onto the HiFi tracks; then I could dub people whichever version they wanted -- the actors could get one of their show, the technical people one of 'theirs.' Today I suppose you could do the same thing with multiple audio tracks on MiniDV.) I've also seen projects for interfacing audio+ClearCom systems together, so that you can hear the house sound as background on your headset, behind the backstage chatter.

Anyway, point is, from a geek's perspective, the ClearCom is a great system, because the hacking potential is limitless and pretty easy.

The RIAA's challenges to Judge Lee R. West's order (pdf) awarding the defendant attorneys fees in Capitol v. Foster and to the "reasonableness" of Ms. Foster's attorneys' fees have not only forced the RIAA to disclose its own attorneys fees, and caused the judge to issue a second decision labeling them as "disingenuous", their motives "questionable", and their factual statements "not true", but have now caused the amount of the fees to more than double, from $55,000 to $114,000, as evidenced by Ms. Foster's supplemental fee application (pdf's).

In a comment earlier today, I responded to a comment regarding inheritance taxes. As I find the topic interesting, I decided to expand on it. Consider this a work-in-progress.

Inheritance taxes are frequently put forward as a sort of anti-aristocratic tool; a way to somehow prevent families from passing large sums of money -- and consequently, power -- down from one generation to another and perpetuating themselves without any real 'work.'

I believe this is wrong, in multiple senses. First, it is wrong in the moral sense, since I believe that it is a violation of any reasonable definition of human rights which allow for the free and independent action of individuals to exercise control over their property as they see fit. (I am aware that there are some people who do not believe in such rights, but frankly I'm not interested in arguing with them -- I'm also aware that there are people who believe that the Earth is flat, or that God created the world 5,000 years ago in about a week; there's a certain point where I'm willing to just write people off as wrong and save my breath. Suffice it to say that if you don't believe in, or are unwilling to take the concept of physical property as a premise, I have very little else to say to you.)

Leaving aside the moral wrongness of inheritance taxes, I also think that they clearly fail at what's often put forward as their chief purpose: preventing the creation of a capitalist aristocracy. Far from this, they actually perpetuate and protect a very particular kind of non-meritocratic aristocracy: the aristocracy not of money, but of political and social power and connections.

Inheritance taxes punish hardest those people who are highly successful in the financial sense, but unsuccessful in the political or social realms; when they die, they leave their children mostly money, which is then pillaged by the government. In contrast, someone else who took the majority of their financial wealth and skillfully converted it to political power (a basically straightforward transaction, for someone raised in the right environment), could easily pass these connections onto their children, entirely untaxed and unfettered.

Thus, the true aristocracy escapes the inheritance taxes and manage to perpetuate their power, because their biggest assets are not necessarily in their bank accounts or even in their investments, they are in their social networks and contacts; they are in the people that they can get their children in to meet; the schools they can get them into; in some cases, simply their names themselves.

Rather than being hurt by inheritance taxes, the true aristocracy realizes that wealth is more than just money, and doesn't seem too worried by them; you rarely hear the Rockefellers or the Kennedys whining, for instance. And why should they -- in fact, inheritance taxes are the best form of protectionism for the truly powerful, because it provides a barrier to entry, keeping the nouveau riche from ever pushing themselves into the very top echelon. The nature of true power is that it takes time to accrue, and by levying punishing taxes on those who have recently acquired power (and still have it in cash, rather than in the more nebulous social connections of "old money") they can keep them down and the playing field sparse.

In short, inheritance taxes protect and encourage those who play 'by the rules' -- rules written by the very powerful. Buy into the system, take your money and pour it into quasi-philanthropy, skillful investment, and political contributions, and you can create power that will last through generations; try to keep it in the bank, and it'll be decimated before your children can use it.