Net News

House Committee Passes SPY ACT

The U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection has passed the SPY ACT (Securely Protect Yourself Against Cyber Trespass Act).

Introduced by Mary Bono (R-CA) and Ed Towns (D-NY), the Act is designed to shield consumers from invasive and unsolicited spyware.

In a statement on her Web site, Bono said that the “[p]assage of the SPY ACT … represents a cooperative effort to bring commonsense legislation forward to protect consumers from the threat of spyware. … We are one step closer to restoring safety, confidence and control to consumers when using their own computers.”

Bono adds that the Act was passed with an amendment, introduced by Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns (R-FL), that includes provisions to prohibit unfair or deceptive behavior such as key-stroke logging, computer high jacking and the display of advertisements that cannot be closed.

The Act, introduced by Bono as H.R. 2929, is scheduled to go before the full Energy and Commerce Committee shortly, before going before the full House of Representatives.

As this issue was getting sent to press came word that a Utah's spyware law was blocked by Third District Judge Joseph C. Fratto, Jr., who ruled that adware provider WhenU.com proved that it would have sustained irreparable harm had the law gone into effect. WhenU insists that it only downloads its software into users' computers with their consent, and is not “spyware” as it does not gather a user's private information. “Spyware is a problem and we want to put an end to it,” Avi Naider, chief executive of WhenU, is quoted as saying in a wire service report. “WhenU supports appropriate anti-spyware legislation at the federal level, but unfortunately Utah's Act also impairs legitimate Internet advertising.”

For more on spyware, see “Spyware Remains Elusive.”

Maybe it's time to give the RIAA its own column. For the fifth month in a row, we're reporting that the Recording Industry Association of America is suing people who have downloaded music via a peer-to-peer (P2P) Web site. Again using the “John Doe” method – suing under that name because of an appellate court ruling that allows Internet service providers (ISPs) to keep their customer names private – the RIAA filed suit against an additional 482 people. (For more on the RIAA's initiative and the “John Doe” method it's been using, see “The RIAA's New Frontier” in our June 2004 issue.) The latest round of suits makes a grand total of 3429 since September of last year. Broken down by state, 213 individuals were sued in St. Louis, 55 in Denver, 206 in Washington, D.C. and eight in New Jersey.

“Illegal downloading continues to cause enormous harm to the entire music community,” Steven Marks, general counsel of the RIAA said in a press release. “We must stay on the path of education, enforcement, and offering great legal services.”

In a related story to the RIAA lawsuits, in its first week of operation in Europe, pay-for-download online music service iTunes downloaded 800,000 tracks in the United Kingdom, France and Germany, parent Apple Computer, Inc. reported. That's enough to make the service the leading online music store in Europe, according to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “In the UK alone, iTunes sold more than 450,000 songs in the last week ' 16 times as many as OD2, its closest competitor,” Jobs says.

iTunes has sold more than 85 million songs in the U.S. since launching last April, according to Apple.

The success of iTunes, and similar services such as the new Napster, is spurring the RIAA to continue its fight in the courts against illegal downloaders, and is proving that there is, in fact, a very real market for legitimate (paying) downloads.

Meanwhile, stateside, a bill was been introduced in the U.S. Senate (just prior to press time for this issue) that would make it easier for peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading services ' such as KaZaA ' to be sued for copyright infringement. Backed by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle (SD), and the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy (VT), The Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004 would allow companies to be held liable if they “intentionally induce” copyright infringement.

With elections looming, the Senate will have to act quickly if it wants to make the bill into law before new faces ' and new agendas ' arrive on the Senate floor.

Does it seem like you've received more spam than usual at your America Online (AOL) e-mail account recently? That may have been caused by a now-former AOL software engineer that was arrested in late June for creating a list of 92 million AOL screen names and selling them to spammers for $100,000, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in NY for violation of the CAN-SPAM Act. Jason Smathers, 24, who worked in AOL's Dulles, VA office, was charged with conspiracy after being arrested for selling the names to Sean Dunaway, a 21-year Las Vegas Internet marketer, who used the names to promote his online gambling site and sold the names to spammers. Dunaway was also arrested and charged with conspiracy. Smathers, obviously, was fired by AOL. Both Smathers and Dunaway face up to 5 years in prison plus a fine of $250,000 under the Act.

House Committee Passes SPY ACT

The U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection has passed the SPY ACT (Securely Protect Yourself Against Cyber Trespass Act).

Introduced by Mary Bono (R-CA) and Ed Towns (D-NY), the Act is designed to shield consumers from invasive and unsolicited spyware.

In a statement on her Web site, Bono said that the “[p]assage of the SPY ACT … represents a cooperative effort to bring commonsense legislation forward to protect consumers from the threat of spyware. … We are one step closer to restoring safety, confidence and control to consumers when using their own computers.”

Bono adds that the Act was passed with an amendment, introduced by Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns (R-FL), that includes provisions to prohibit unfair or deceptive behavior such as key-stroke logging, computer high jacking and the display of advertisements that cannot be closed.

The Act, introduced by Bono as H.R. 2929, is scheduled to go before the full Energy and Commerce Committee shortly, before going before the full House of Representatives.

As this issue was getting sent to press came word that a Utah's spyware law was blocked by Third District Judge Joseph C. Fratto, Jr., who ruled that adware provider WhenU.com proved that it would have sustained irreparable harm had the law gone into effect. WhenU insists that it only downloads its software into users' computers with their consent, and is not “spyware” as it does not gather a user's private information. “Spyware is a problem and we want to put an end to it,” Avi Naider, chief executive of WhenU, is quoted as saying in a wire service report. “WhenU supports appropriate anti-spyware legislation at the federal level, but unfortunately Utah's Act also impairs legitimate Internet advertising.”

For more on spyware, see “Spyware Remains Elusive.”

Maybe it's time to give the RIAA its own column. For the fifth month in a row, we're reporting that the Recording Industry Association of America is suing people who have downloaded music via a peer-to-peer (P2P) Web site. Again using the “John Doe” method – suing under that name because of an appellate court ruling that allows Internet service providers (ISPs) to keep their customer names private – the RIAA filed suit against an additional 482 people. (For more on the RIAA's initiative and the “John Doe” method it's been using, see “The RIAA's New Frontier” in our June 2004 issue.) The latest round of suits makes a grand total of 3429 since September of last year. Broken down by state, 213 individuals were sued in St. Louis, 55 in Denver, 206 in Washington, D.C. and eight in New Jersey.

“Illegal downloading continues to cause enormous harm to the entire music community,” Steven Marks, general counsel of the RIAA said in a press release. “We must stay on the path of education, enforcement, and offering great legal services.”

In a related story to the RIAA lawsuits, in its first week of operation in Europe, pay-for-download online music service iTunes downloaded 800,000 tracks in the United Kingdom, France and Germany, parent Apple Computer, Inc. reported. That's enough to make the service the leading online music store in Europe, according to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “In the UK alone, iTunes sold more than 450,000 songs in the last week ' 16 times as many as OD2, its closest competitor,” Jobs says.

iTunes has sold more than 85 million songs in the U.S. since launching last April, according to Apple.

The success of iTunes, and similar services such as the new Napster, is spurring the RIAA to continue its fight in the courts against illegal downloaders, and is proving that there is, in fact, a very real market for legitimate (paying) downloads.

Meanwhile, stateside, a bill was been introduced in the U.S. Senate (just prior to press time for this issue) that would make it easier for peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading services ' such as KaZaA ' to be sued for copyright infringement. Backed by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle (SD), and the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy (VT), The Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004 would allow companies to be held liable if they “intentionally induce” copyright infringement.

With elections looming, the Senate will have to act quickly if it wants to make the bill into law before new faces ' and new agendas ' arrive on the Senate floor.

Does it seem like you've received more spam than usual at your America Online (AOL) e-mail account recently? That may have been caused by a now-former AOL software engineer that was arrested in late June for creating a list of 92 million AOL screen names and selling them to spammers for $100,000, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in NY for violation of the CAN-SPAM Act. Jason Smathers, 24, who worked in AOL's Dulles, VA office, was charged with conspiracy after being arrested for selling the names to Sean Dunaway, a 21-year Las Vegas Internet marketer, who used the names to promote his online gambling site and sold the names to spammers. Dunaway was also arrested and charged with conspiracy. Smathers, obviously, was fired by AOL. Both Smathers and Dunaway face up to 5 years in prison plus a fine of $250,000 under the Act.