Author Archives: Joe Mullin

Dentist who copyrighted patient reviews must pay $4,766

A dentist who used a controversial contract to take “ownership” of her patient’s reviews has been slapped with a court order to pay $4,766.

It’s a not-entirely-satisfying end to a legal battle that began in 2011, when Dr. Stacy Makhnevich was sued by Robert Lee, a patient who challenged the arrangement. A company called Medical Justice created the contracts, which granted Makhnevich copyright for any potential patient reviews.

Medical Justice refused to defend the lawsuit, saying it was “retiring” that contract. Then Makhnevich literally made a run for it. Her own lawyers were unable to contact her, and she’s been nowhere to be found since 2013.

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Silk Road Trial: Prosecutors Compare Ulbricht’s E-Mail with DPR’s Online Life

NEW YORK—IRS Special Agent Gary Alford showed a jury personal e-mails from Ross Ulbricht’s Gmail account that prosecutors say line up with chats and other records from the Silk Road drug-trafficking site.

In 2013, Alford searched through the Gmail account belonging to Ulbricht, the 30-year-old Texan who stands accused of being the mastermind behind the Silk Road drug-trafficking website. Alford’s testimony today compared information found on Ulbricht’s computer, including Silk Road expense sheets and chats with administrators, with Ulbricht’s personal Gmail account. Alford also looked through Ulbricht’s Facebook posts.

Prosecutors weren’t able to show any direct mentions of Silk Road on Ulbricht’s Gmail or on Facebook. Instead, they associated e-mails from Ulbricht’s personal life and receipts for travel and electronics with the data found on his laptop, which was open to a Silk Road management page when he was arrested in San Francisco.

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Researcher Links 20 Percent of Ulbricht’s Bitcoins to Silk Road Accounts

Ross Ulbricht was back in a Manhattan federal courtroom today facing drug trafficking and money laundering charges for allegedly running the Silk Road online drug marketplace. We’ll have a story on today’s court action posted shortly.

A few hours ago, computer security researcher Nicholas Weaver published some analysis about bitcoins he says came from Ross Ulbricht’s accounts. If the government has done a similar analysis—and there’s no reason to think they couldn’t—it will be one more obstacle for Ulbricht’s defense team.

Last week, the outlines of Ulbricht’s defense became clear. Ulbricht’s lawyer Joshua Dratel admitted that his client founded Silk Road, but said Ulbricht walked away from the site only to be “lured back.” During opening statements, the defense attorney acknowledged that Ulbricht, who had 144,000 bitcoins on his computer seized by the feds, made money from Bitcoin. Dratel said this was, at least in part, from being a successful trader in the digital crypto-currency.

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Who Was Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts? As Trial Nears, a Jury Will Decide

The man accused of running the Silk Road, the Internet’s biggest drug market, is about to get his day in court. Prosecutors and defense lawyers are already poring over juror questionnaires, and a panel of New York citizens will be selected on Tuesday.

There still isn’t much that’s been made public about how the trial will proceed. Whatever happens, the trial, expected to last at least four weeks, is sure to reveal more about the dark corners of the so-called “Darknet” and the authorities’ efforts to master it.

Ross Ulbricht, the 30-year-old Texan who prosecutors say was the mastermind of the drug trafficking website, has remained steadfast in his innocence since his arrest more than a year ago. Barring a last-minute deal, his fate will soon be in the hands of a jury. If convicted, he faces decades in prison.

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Google Handled 345 Million Copyright Takedowns in 2014

Piracy news site TorrentFreak reports that Google removed 75 percent more URLs in 2014 than it did the previous year.

Google doesn’t tally up annual totals, but it does release weekly reports on DMCA notices, and TorrentFreak took it upon itself to add up the weekly reports. Most of the takedown requests are honored. Google has a longstanding tradition of supplying DMCA takedown notices to Chilling Effects, a website that archives such requests.

Just a few years back, the number of takedown requests could be measured in the dozens, not the millions. In 2008, Google handled 62 DMCA takedown requests, and, in that year, each request was over just one copyrighted work. In later years, DMCA notices came to ask for millions of URLs to be removed to protect multiple works.

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Seattle PD Cuts a Deal With Mass-Video Requestor, Institutes “Hack-a-Thon”

A computer programmer whose massive public records request threatened Seattle’s plan to put body cameras on its police officers has made peace with the police department.

Today’s Seattle Times reports that Seattle Police Department COO Mike Wagers has invited the man into police headquarters to meet with him and tech staff to discuss how he could receive video regularly. As a condition of the meeting, he has dropped the public records request.

“I’m hoping he can help us with the larger systemic issue—how can we release as much video as possible and redact what we need to redact so we can be transparent?” Wagers told the newspaper. “What do we have to lose? We have nothing to hide. There are no secrets.”

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Jury: Apple must pay $23.6M for old pager patents

Apple has lost a jury trial in the patent hotspot of East Texas. Late Monday, a jury in Marshall reached a verdict that Apple must pay $23.6 million for infringing patents once owned by a Mississippi pager company. The verdict, while large, is only about 10 percent of what lawyers for Mobile Telecommunications Technology LLC (MTel) were asking for.

According to a Bloomberg report on the case, Mobile Telecommunications was a wireless messaging pioneer in the 1990s when these patents were filed. The patents were used in its SkyTel 2-way paging system. Now, MTel is a licensing company controlled by United Wireless Holdings, which operates the SkyTel paging system for use by first responders and doctors.

“The guys working back then at SkyTel were way ahead of their time,” United Wireless CEO Andrew Fitton told Bloomberg. “This is vindication for all their work.” Fitton is also CEO of Hartmann Capital, a London investment bank.

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Sirius May Have to Pay up for Pre-1972 Songs Under State Copyright

Songs recorded before 1972 aren’t protected by federal copyright. Recently, though, some older bands have started looking for royalty payments based on the patchwork of state copyright laws.

1960s rock band The Turtles sued Sirius XM seeking payments for use of their songs. If the band is successful in its lawsuit, it could open the door to lawsuits against online streaming media over older song titles. Pandora was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America earlier this year and last month by The Turtles.

On Friday, the band had a breakthrough in its case. US District Judge Colleen McMahon said that unless a factual issue requiring a trial comes up by December 5, she intends to rule in favor of The Turtles and against Sirius, according to a Reuters report.

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Copyright Office to Consider 6th Round of Exemptions for Dodging DRM

Stockmonkeys.com

Since 1998, breaking most types of digital locks, often called Digital Rights Management (DRM), is against the law. Even well-lawyered companies that tried to plead fair use, as RealPlayer did in 2008, have been crushed. What chance does a regular Joe have?

But if you have a legal use for copyrighted content, there is an “out.” Every three years, the Copyright Office accepts petitions on what activities should get an “exemption” under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The sixth tri-annual rulemaking is now upon us, and the deadline is this Monday, November 3.

“It’s not a heavy lift to file a petition,” said Sherwin Siy, VP of legal affairs at Public Knowledge, an advocacy group that’s long been active on copyright issues. “Five pages, max, short and sweet.”

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Secrets Become History: Edward Snowden on Film as Citizenfour

Radius

Citizenfour is filmmaker Laura Poitras’ account of the first meetings between herself, Glenn Greenwald, and Edward Snowden. It was first shown publicly last Friday, and it will open in theaters in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco on October 24.

For those who have followed the news around the Snowden documents, even in small doses, Citizenfour isn’t full of revelations (though there are a few surprises). But for viewers interested in surveillance, or the future of the Internet, or journalism—it won’t matter. The film is riveting, and its power is in its source material.

Poitras filmed Snowden for 20 hours over eight days in his Hong Kong hotel, and her film has now given the world an unfiltered portrait of the man who, in the course of the year, became the West’s most wanted dissident.

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Dorian Nakamoto, Fingered as Bitcoin Creator, Wants to Sue Newsweek

Ethan Kirschner

In March, Newsweek came roaring back to the print world with a tech-themed cover story. The publication said it had discovered “the face behind Bitcoin”—an unemployed engineer living an unassuming life in a Los Angeles suburb.

Within days of publication, critics began pointing out that the magazine’s case that Dorian Nakamoto was actually Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto was based on circumstantial evidence. The 65-year-old Dorian Nakamoto, who has no background in cryptography at all, denied the story after it was published. Newsweek and author Leah McGrath Goodman did not apologize and instead doubled down on their thesis, putting out a statement that “the facts as reported point toward Mr. Nakamoto’s role in the founding of Bitcoin.”

Now, Nakamoto and his lawyer Ethan Kirschner have made clear they’d like to sue Newsweek over the story—but they need more money to do it. The two have created a website called “Newsweek Lied,” which lays out their grievances and features a photo of Dorian Nakamoto holding a sign saying “Newsweek’s article hurt my family.”