In one of the first ever extraditions for an intellectual property offense, the leader of one of the oldest and most renowned Internet software piracy groups was arraigned today in U.S. District Court, Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher of the Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg for the Eastern District of Virginia announced today.

Hew Raymond Griffiths, 44, a British national living in Bateau Bay, Australia, appeared today in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., before Magistrate Judge Barry R. Poretz. The defendant was extradited from Australia and is charged with one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and one count of criminal copyright infringement. If convicted on both counts, Griffiths could receive a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $500,000 fine. Prior to his arrival in the United States, he had spent nearly three years incarcerated at a detention center in Australia while fighting his extradition in Australian court.

“Griffiths claimed to be beyond the reach of U.S. law, and today, we have proven otherwise,” said Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher. “This extradition represents the Department of Justice’s commitment to protect intellectual property rights from those who violate our laws from the other side of the globe.”

“Our agents and prosecutors are working tirelessly to nab intellectual property thieves, even where their crimes transcend international borders,” said U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg.

The indictment, which was returned in March 2003, charges Griffiths with violating the criminal copyright laws of the United States as the leader of an organized criminal group known as DrinkOrDie, which had a reputation as one of the oldest security-conscious piracy groups on the Internet. DrinkOrDie was founded in Russia in 1993 and expanded internationally throughout the 1990s. The group was dismantled by the Justice Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of Operation Buccaneer in December 2001, with more than 70 raids conducted in the U.S. and five foreign countries, including the United Kingdom, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Australia. To date, Operation Buccaneer has resulted in 30 felony convictions and 10 convictions of foreign nationals overseas. Prior to its dismantling, DrinkOrDie was estimated to have caused the illegal reproduction and distribution of more than $50 million worth of pirated software, movies, games and music.

“Counterfeiting and piracy of intellectual property are global parasites estimated to rob the legitimate world economy of more than $400 billion annually,” said Assistant Secretary Julie Myers. “The indictment charges that Griffiths was co-leader of DrinkOrDie, which was part of an underground online community that consisted of individuals and organized groups who used the Internet to engage in the large-scale, illegal distribution of copyright protected software, games, movies and music worth $50 million.”

According to the indictment, Griffiths, known by the screen nickname “Bandido,” was a longtime leader of DrinkOrDie and an elder in the highest echelons of the underground Internet piracy community, also known as the warez scene. He held leadership roles in several other well-known warez groups, including Razor1911 and RiSC. In an interview published in December 1999 by an online news source, he boasted that he ran all of DrinkOrDie’s day-to-day operations and controlled access to more than 20 of the top warez servers worldwide. In fact, Griffiths claimed to reporters that he would never be caught.

According to the indictment, Griffiths oversaw all the illegal operations of DrinkOrDie which specialized in cracking software and distributing the cracked versions over the Internet. Once cracked, these software versions could be copied and used without limitation. Members stockpiled the illegal software on huge Internet computer storage sites that were filled with tens of thousands of individual software, game, movie and music titles worth millions of dollars. The group used encryption and an array of other sophisticated technological security measures to hide their activities from law enforcement.

This case is being prosecuted by Deputy Chief Michael DuBose and trial attorney Jay Prabhu of the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Wiechering of the Eastern District of Virginia.

The charges contained in the indictment are allegations only and the defendant is presumed innocent until convicted at trial.

Apple Inc. has another week to respond to Cisco Systems Inc.'s trademark infringement lawsuit that threatens to keep Apple from using the name "iPhone" on its much-hyped cell phone-music player.

After the companies had previously agreed to extend the deadline until Thursday night, the world's largest networking equipment maker said Apple now has until Wednesday to respond to the lawsuit filed last month in San Francisco federal court.

Both companies reiterated previous statements that they want to use the extra time to reach a settlement.

Cisco, whose Linksys division began shipping a line of iPhones last spring, has said it would allow Apple to use the trademarked name but wants both companies' phones to be able to communicate with each other. It has not provided details of such interoperability.

Apple has called the lawsuit "silly" and argued that it's entitled to use the iPhone name because the phones operate over different networks. Apple's works using cellular technology, and Cisco's operates over the Internet using a technology called Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP.

Cisco has owned the trademark since 2000, when it acquired InfoGear Technology Corp., which originally registered the name.

The popular online social networking Web site MySpace.com has sued a Colorado man once accused of being one of the world's top three spammers, saying the man gained access to MySpace profiles using stolen passwords and used the information to send spam bulletins.

MySpace, which is owned by News Corp., claims Scott Richter and his various companies, including OptInRealBig.com and Mediabreakway.com, sent millions of spam messages to members using technology that made the messages look like they had come from individual members' accounts.

The lawsuit was filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles and asks for damages, an injunction preventing Richter and his companies from accessing MySpace, and repayment of all profits gained as a result of the activity.

Several calls to Richter were not returned Monday.

Managing its rapid growth has been a challenge for MySpace, which has fallen prey to people who launch spam attacks.

Unlike random unsolicited e-mails, which are readily identified as junk, the spam bulletins on MySpace appear to be sent by trusted friends, giving them an air of legitimacy.

Troubled ringtone vendor, Infospace which recently lost on of its largest clients has been hit by a US$100 million lawsuit from the music publisher, EMI. The complaint alleges that InfoSpace and its subsidiaries Moviso and Premium Wireless Services have been underpaying royalties and selling ringtones for songs to which they hold no licensing rights.

The lawsuit also claims that InfoSpace has "engaged in a deliberate effort to frustrate and obstruct the audit rights held by plaintiffs pursuant to license agreements."

EMI says that it had requested an audit of InfoSpace's accounts to ensure accurate royalty payments but was met with "diversion, obstruction, misdirection and misinformation." Specifically, EMI alleges that InfoSpace claimed it did not have access to many of its records, and then refused to turn them over.

EMI claims it turned over information it acquired to its auditors at Gelfand Rennert & Feldman, who concluded that InfoSpace was miscalculating royalties due to downloads through third-party Web sites operated by cell phone carriers Verizon and US Cellular; failing to report royalties for eight approved sub-licensees; and failing to pay royalties for compositions that appeared on its catalogue of offerings.

InfoSpace also says that it will announce fourth quarter 2006 financial results on Thursday, February 1, 2007, after market close.

Four families whose daughters were sexually assaulted by predators they met on popular internet social network MySpace sued owner News Corp this week for negligence and fraud, the lawyers representing the families said in a statement.

The families, from New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, filed suits in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday. The suits involve five girls, ranging in age from 14 to 15 years old, who the lawyers said were lured to meet with older MySpace members and sexually assaulted.

One 15-year-old girl was drugged and assaulted in 2006 by an older MySpace user, the lawyers said. The user pleaded guilty to sexual assault and is serving a 10-year sentence, they said.

Last year, the parents of a 14-year-old girl in Austin, Texas, sued MySpace for $US30 million after she was sexually assaulted by a 19-year-old man she met on the network.

"In our view, MySpace waited entirely too long to attempt to institute meaningful security measures that effectively increase the safety of their underage users," Jason Itkin, an lawyer at law firm Arnold & Itkin LLP, which is representing the families, said in a statement.

Google, the world’s leading search engine, shows about 40 million search queries for Web 2.0, the buzzword everyone in the Internet business today is talking about.
Then what in the world does Web 2.0 refer to? Is the Internet becoming a version of a software application? Even tech gurus are hesitant to answer these simple questions.

In fact, Web 2.0 is ill defined and its exact meaning is extremely elusive. Some even decry it as a marketing catchphrase, while others accept it as nothing but renewed conventional wisdom.

However, efforts are now underway to figure out the characteristics of the next-generation Internet and more and more folks are accepting the concept of Web 2.0.

Most experts pick brisk participation of Internet users in creating contents or the increased importance of collective intelligence as core factors of this.

In addition, they agree techsavvy South Koreans have already applied Web 2.0 to their Internet usage, starting years ago, even before the term was coined.

Advent of Web 2.0

There is no agreement on exactly what Web 2.0 means but there is an agreement on who first created the term - O’Reilly Media of the United States first used it in early 2004.

O’Reilly indicated that the dot.com bubble burst in the fall of 2001 signified the beginning of Web 2.0 and a flurry of new technological applications.

The most outstanding principle that the Web 2.0 companies share is that they use the power of the Internet in order to collaborate, communicate and grow, according to O’Reilly.

Under concepts that the Web is a platform, O’Reilly further defines Web 2.0 as a set of core principles and practices like participation, collective intelligence and rich user experiences, to name but a few.

Since then, Web 2.0 gained credibility in the tech world but the term caused confusion _ it does appear to mean different things to different people.

Observers point out Web 2.0 doesn’t have a hard boundary and it is a trend to explain the evolution of the Web from a producer- oriented world to a consumer- centered space.

“At its heart, Web 2.0 is about the participation of end users. They are no longer passive consumers of Web contents but are proactive producers,” said Kang Rok-hee, an analyst at Daishin Securities.

“In a sense, Web 2.0 lies on a natural development path of the Internet and the characteristics that go beyond the enhanced role of Internet users might be called Web 3.0 some time in the future,” Kang said.

Collective Intelligence

To understand the new crest of the Internet, Kang said that it is important to understand a host of Web 2.0-esque services such as Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a copyright free online encyclopedia, which relies on volunteer writers from across the world to pen upside of 4 million articles in several languages.

“Wikipedia involves as many people as possible _ ordinary users create articles and others upgrade them around the clock. Readers become writers and that is a norm in the Web 2.0 era,” Kang said.

“The result is encouraging as the new-born Wikipedia boasts of a wide coverage and correctness comparable to the timehonored Encyclopedia Britannica,” Kang said.

Wikipedia came out in 2001 when enough people worldwide had gained access to the Internet at an affordable price.

This contrasts to Britannica, first published in around 1770, which many top-tier experts in each field embellished through seamless updates and revisions over time.

Naturally, concerns are flaring up that Wikipedia entries might not be reliable because unpaid amateur contributors can make miscues or unscrupulous writers may intentionally mess things up.

Late last year, however, the British-based journal Nature confirmed the reliability of Wikipedia by finding the site comes just as close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries.

Among articles covering a broad swath of the scientific spectrum in the two encyclopedias, Nature reviewers conducted a side-by-side comparison to detect eight serious errors, four from each source alike.

“The openness of Wikipedia can be just as much of a strength as it can be a problem _ the openness that allows vandals to cause troubles also allows other contributors to restore order and self-police the site,” said Min Kyung-bae at Kyung Hee Cyber University.

“This amply demonstrates the power of collective intelligence and Web 2.0-based services. You can find a similar example in the emerging open-source programs against proprietary ones,” he said.

Korean Edge

Wayne Lee, an economist at Woori Securities, is saying Web 2.0 started in Korea a few years ago, even before the term was coined.

“Take a look at the so-called knowledge search services of NHN. It began in the early 2000s but it retains elements and components of Web 2.0,” Lee said.

“In addition, social networking sites like Cyworld and user created contents, which are huge in Korea, are all evidence that Web 2.0 is already burgeoning here,” he noted.

Under the knowledge search of NHN, users post their questions that are answered by other users _ creating a database that now totals tens of millions of entries.

The services were devised because Koreans often come up short when attempting to find information in their native tongue _ the number of Koreanlanguage sites is just 1 billion in comparison to 20 billion of English ones.

“The logic of the knowledge search is to extract what exists inside people’s brain to the Web site. It was designed to increase the Korean-language database,” NHN chief executive officer Chae Hwi-young told reporters late Sept. in a closed-door meeting.

Experts project Korea will be able to preempt the global thrust for Web 2.0 services and applications thanks to its tech-savvy children, called “digital natives,” who continue to spring up.

Digital native refers to the first generation of people who were born and grew up in the 21st century Internet era surrounded by gadgets such as computers and cell phones.

“With a majority of its preschoolers going online regularly, Korea is filled with digital natives who will spearhead the full-fledged advent of Web 2.0 era and beyond,” said Park Junghyun, a senior researcher at the LG Economic Research Institute.

Indeed, a majority of Korean children between the ages of three and five go online periodically _ a recent government survey found that 50.3 percent of this age group use the Internet at least once a month.

“Korea has bright prospects regarding Web 2.0. Currently, it already has an edge and digital natives are expected to sharpen it down the road,” he said.