The Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits state and local governments and other “places of public accommodation” from discriminating against individuals with disabilities.   Under the ADA, a place of public accommodation “shall take those steps that may be necessary to ensure that no individual with a disability is excluded, denied services, segregated or otherwise treated differently than other individuals because of the absence of auxiliary aids and services, unless the public accommodation can demonstrate that taking those steps would fundamentally alter the nature of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations being offered or would result in an undue burden, i.e., significant difficulty or expense.”

The ADA does not specify what is meant by a “place” of public accommodation.  A case is now pending, Stern v Sony, which will determine whether an online gaming forum would constitute a a place of public accommodation. In 1996, the DOJ’s Civil Rights office stated that the provisions of the ADA should apply to Internet websites. But federal courts are split on this issue. In 1994, in Carpats Distribution Center v. Automotive Wholesalers Ass’n of New England, the court decided that a public accommodation includes areas more than physical structures. Dicta in a 1999 case, Doe v. Mutual of Omaha Insurance Company, also suggested that electronic websites could be considered in public facilities.

However, other courts have stated that the ADA was intended to apply only to an actual physical location. For example, the court in Ford v. Schering-Plough Corporation did not allow the ADA to be extended to an insurance policy as it should only apply to actual physical places.

As we become increasingly more dependent on the Internet, the threat of cyber attacks has become a pressing concern. Dennis C Blair, the director of National Intelligence, has said to the Senate Intelligence Committee that “malicious cyber activity is occurring on an unprecedented scale with extraordinary sophistication.”

In a recent simulated cyber attack, a “March Madness” application was made available for smart phones, which was downloaded by many college basketball fans.  While the users thought that they were simply following their favorite teams, their passwords were being stolen and their emails intercepted. The March Madness application hid a spyware program that could hack into these smart phones.  The madness that ensued transcended the basketball games on the court. This spyware affected over 60 million cellphones and various electric grids across the nation. The simulated cyber attack was named “Cyber Shockwave.”

After the exercise, former White House advisors and other officials joined together in order to discuss the vulnerabilities of our nation’s digital infrastructure. In order to discuss such vulnerabilities, these leaders participated in a three hour simulated crisis meeting. The event was run by the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington DC. None of the panelists knew what the scenario was in advance and they were supposed to act as they would if the scenario was real. However, the results of this meeting hardly assuaged anyone’s woes of the dangers of cyber attacks.  Although each advisor suggested various solutions to the fake attack, there was no overarching idea of how to prevent such an attack.

Harriton High School is Pennsylvania has been using laptop webcams for a new, unconventional reason, at least according to parents. One  family has alleged that the school was using the webcam to spy on their fifteen year old son. Of course, this accusation has created a frenzy with the other parents, the school district, and civil liberties groups. One family submitted a motion to Judge Jan DuBois requesting a restraining order against the activation of the webcam which they refer to a “peeping tom technology”. The complaint further states that the school periodically turns on the cameras on the computers to monitor the student and their usage of the computer issued by the county and that “many of the images captured and intercepted may consist of images of minors and their parents or friends in compromising or embarrassing positions, including, but not limited to, in various stages of dress or undress.” The school has insisted that the camera is only turned on if the laptop was lost or stolen in order to find the missing equipment.

The Robbins’ motion was prompted by their son being accused by the assistant principle of Harriton High of taking and selling drugs. The student claims that he was eating candy but the school says that using images of the student from the webcam, they witnessed the drug handling. The Robbins said that their child was at home while using a computer that was not reported as lost or stolen and that pictures were taking of him without the permission of his parents while he was at home.

According to PC Mag Online:

Microsoft and Amazon on Monday signed a cross-license agreement under which both companies will have access to each other’s patent portfolio. The deal covers a “broad range” of products, including Amazon’s Kindle and Amazon’s use of Linux-based servers. Exact terms of the deal were not released, but it was revealed that Amazon will pay Microsoft for the access.

The article goes on to state that the goal of agreements like these is to help prevent costly patent litigation down the road.

The full article can be read here.

In a recent interview with gaming website IGN, John Koller, a Sony Hardware Marketing Director, detailed new plans to help combat piracy on Sony’s portable system, the PSP (Playstation Portable).

IGN reported that the plan calls for:

Those who purchase SOCOM Fireteam Bravo 3 are now required to register the title through PlayStation Network before given access to online gameplay. UMD copies of the game will come with a voucher code that must be redeemed online, while digital copies will automatically register in the background. Those who buy a used copy of the UMD can purchase a PSN entitlement voucher for $20 to play online.

It’s also a move designed to both counter piracy and ensure a revenue stream from games even if they are sold in the secondary market.

The full interview can be read here

You Don’t Know Jack was a popular game and trivia quiz show during the 1990s. You Don’t Know Quack is part of a new ad campaign for the Aflac Insurance company. Jellyvision, the makers of You Don’t Know Jack, are not very happy with this new ad campaign and are suing Aflac claiming trademark infringement. Kotaku has some details on the lawsuit:

The suit, filed on January 21 in United States District Court for the Norther District of Illinois, alleges that Aflac’s You Don’t Know Quack marketing campaign and corresponding webgame infringe on Jellyvision’s long-held trademark for You Don’t Know Jack.

Jellvision Inc.’s suit claims that the logo for Aflac’s web-game and the style of the game itself — a series of questions — are similar enough to You Don’t Know Jack’s to compel legal action.

The company is seeking monetary damages and a court order to stop Aflac from obtaining a trademark for You Don’t Know Quack.

Now that we have discussed how a company can protect their content during development we should look at the next logical part of protecting one’s products: content protection during production.

The first step is ensuring that you know your manufacturers and can trust their own internal security measures. Most product leaks occur because someone at a replication facility made a copy of the product and spread it via the internet. Do not be afraid to investigate and ask questions before outsourcing. One solution to the risks of outsourcing is to keep as much production possible done internally. For every link in the chain you add (in terms of outside production) you increase the risk of your products being pirated and you not being able to track down the potential source and limit damage.

This leads us to the second step: tracking your products during production. If you have to outsource your production (and even if you handle your production internally) you should be able to track who is doing what during the production phase and when they are doing it. While people can gain access to a console or a locked drawer, the logging of products can help reduce the risk by simply making it harder for people and increasing the likelihood that they will be caught. New products are being developed that allow for a digital watermark that is unseen to the human eye and for low costs too, which makes tracking people even easier. In short making sure you know and trust your manufacturers and keeping track of your products during production are two key steps to preventing piracy of your company’s products.

Today we examine one of the various ways that content producers can protect themselves during the content production stage from piracy.

One key component is that only a limited number of employees should have access to the products in development. This should not aim to limit collaborative design work; instead it should ensure that only the people needed on the project are involved in the development chain. Too often leaks occur because someone outside the necessary development chain spreads the products to unauthorized users. This occurred during the development of Doom 3 when a non ID Software employee at a graphics card company pirated a pre-release version of the game. The game which had been worked under a fairly large veil of secrecy now became available for both consumers and competitors to try out. The key lesson is to ensure that your internal team is kept to a minimum needed for development and innovation, but also remains manageable. A manageable team helps make content easier to keep track of and protect from being stolen or leaked. Accidental leaks have led to the pirating of many products. A recent example was the downloadable content for the game Dragon Age Origins entitled “Return to Ostagar” was accidentally left on a file server accessible to the public. This led to the product being pirated while the retail version was still being tested (because of a last second software bug that was discovered) and the loss of a large amount of potential revenue. Harsh lessons such as the two examples above demonstrate the need for smaller more manageable teams in content production, balanced with the design and innovation needs

One of the biggest problems being faced by all parts of the entertainment industry is the leaking of their products before release date.  It seems more of a miracle these days when a product can actually be released on street date and not suffer from an earlier “pirate release.” The question is how can developers secure their products from a pirated release before an actual street date release? We will look at some of the various strategies available to content producers over the next couple of entries and we will look at protections available during content production, manufacturing, and finally shipping of the product. What steps can be taken during these various stages to protect the intellectual property of content developers? We will look at this very question in our next three entries.

A new documentary entitled Copyright Criminals is premiering at film festivals and on PBS that asks what is the difference between a sample and infringement, if any.

Is sampling and scratching theft or merely traditional cultural appropriation? That’s the central question of the new documentary Copyright Criminals, premiering Tuesday at the Toronto Film Festival as well as on PBS’ Independent Lens series.

When Public Enemy’s legendary 1988 release It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and De La Soul’s epochal 1989 effort 3 Feet High and Rising exploded the possibilities of sample-based sound collage, no one had a clue that hip-hop would become a multibillion-dollar global industry and spark lasting, devastating copyfights.

Were those copyfights legitimate, or simply ruthless attempts to cash in on a zeitgeist that knows no limit? Benjamin Franzen’s Copyright Criminals explores the subject through in-depth interviews with hip-hop’s finest talents, from De La Soul and Public Enemy to DJ Spooky, Jeff Chang, El-P, Mix Master Mike and many more.

The documentary makers even tracked down Clyde Stubblefield — James Brown’s original funky drummer, whose beats have been extensively borrowed to form the backbone of many hip-hop songs. Stubblefield says he has yet to see a dime from all the sampling, as he explains in the Copyright Criminals trailer.

Read More at http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/01/copyright-criminals/#ixzz0d7ceSYQN

Copyright Criminals - Trailer from IndiePix on Vimeo.