Rep. Edolphus Towns, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Rep. Darrell Issa, ranking member of the committee, and Rep. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, sent a letter this week to government officials and to the head of Limewire, expressing their concerns about the potential risk to privacy and security caused by use of P2P networks.
Mark Gorton, chairman of The Lime Group, appeared before the committee almost two years ago. At the time he admitted he was shocked to learn about the sheer amount of confidential and private information that was accidentally (or intentionally) shared using the Limewire software, and vowed to make changes to the software to help prevent accidental sharing of information.
We’re not just talking about curriculum vitae word documents or other personal files common to most users, but some notable accidental P2P leaks are blueprints of Marine One, Social Security numbers, tax returns, and private medical records. “It appears that nearly two years after your commitment to make significant changes in the software, LimeWire and other P2P providers have not taken adequate steps to address this critical problem,” they wrote to Gorton.
Result for: prints
An Australian man has been arrested for allegedly recording movies with his camcorder at a drive-in theater. According to the Motion Picture Association (MPA), an organization representing movie studios around the world, the 26 year old was responsible was responsible for recording a number of cam movies made available by the release group PreVail.
Police seized camcorder and computer equipment in a raid. This equipment was allegedly used for recording recent movies, including “He’s Just Not That Into You”, “Marley and Me”, “Yes Man”, “Bedtime Stories”, and “Beverley Hills Chihuahua”.
They were acting largely on information collected by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT). AFACT is an organization comprised of companies in the Australian film and television industry.
The drive-in where the Cam releases were recorded was identified using digital watermarks added to many film prints before they’re sent to theaters.
“Anyone thinking of illegally camcording a movie should be aware that the technology exists to identify them, track them down and take them to court on criminal copyright charges,” said Neil Gane, Director of Operations at AFACT.
Result for: prints
The Bodleian Library in Oxford and Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC have announced plans to reproduce all 75 editions of William Shakespeare’s plays printed before 1641, online.
“There are no surviving manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays in his handwriting so the quartos are the closest we can get to what Shakespeare really wanted,” said Bodleian spokeswoman Oana Romocea.
“Some quartos do, however, have his annotations around the printed text.”
Many of the quartos are currently only available to scholars and the project is aimed to make the prints more accessible to the general public. The libraries say the downloading of the quartos will begin in April and take about a year to complete.
“We (at the Bodleian) have about 55 copies, although some of them are duplicates,” said Romocea.
“Each quarto is different, so it’s very interesting from a research perspective to compare the quartos.
“For example, some of the famous lines in ‘Hamlet’ exist in one quarto and in another they don’t, or they are very different.”
