Creative Commons is spinning off its awesome remix community thing, ccMixter, into a standalone project, and they're entertaining proposals from the public at large from anyone who thinks they're qualified to run it.

Today we’re announcing a Request For Proposals from entities interested in taking over the site. Please read the entire RFP. Proposals are due within 60 days (July 29) to ccmixter-rfp@creativecommons.org. Inquiries before submitting a proposal are most welcome, to the same address. Please use this address for all inquiries rather than contacting CC or ccMixter personnel directly.

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New York's Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference has announced its summer lineup of keynote speakers for the conference, which runs July 18-20 in NYC:

The very first of the speaker slots for The Last HOPE have been announced with many more to come next week. We have had more submissions than ever and will need to add an additional track in order to accommodate the best of them. What follows are some of the highlights to date.

Steven Levy, author of Hackers: Heroes of the American Revolution and chief technology writer and a senior editor for Newsweek.

Adam Savage, co-host of the popular TV show Mythbusters and "a maker of things."

Kevin Mitnick, "the world's most dangerous hacker" in the eyes of the government and mass media, imprisoned for over five years, and now a successful computer security consultant.

Jello Biafra, a tradition at the HOPE conferences, former lead singer of The Dead Kennedys and one of America's most interesting social activists.

Steven Rambam, private eye extraordinaire, who can find out anything about anybody and has always been willing to share his knowledge of privacy with the hacker community. (The FBI prevented his 2006 talk from being given by swooping in and arresting him moments earlier. The case against him was later found to have no merit.)

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The Nation's Christopher Hayes just turned in a fantastic long feature on Larry Lessig -- it does a great job of capturing what makes Larry so amazingly great.

In the past eight years the collusion between government and business has gotten worse, creating what economist Dean Baker terms the "conservative nanny state." Lessig sees unmaking this state of affairs as the challenge of the era. "There's a speech that Reagan gives in 1965," Lessig says, "where he talks about how democracy always fails because once the people recognize they can vote themselves largess, they just vote themselves largess and the fiscal policy is destroyed. Well, Reagan had it half-right. It's not as if it's the poor out there who have figured out how to suck the money out of the rich. It's exactly the other way around."

In fighting this corporate socialism, Lessig thinks there are allies to be found among the "intellectually honest" right. He points out that the need to raise money from industry provides an incentive to grow government and maintain regulation as a kind of leverage to extract donations from industry. He's made battling earmarks, a conservative cause célèbre, a Change Congress core mission; the first member of Congress to endorse Change Congress was Jim Cooper, a conservative blue-dog Democrat who is eyed suspiciously by the party's activist base. Lessig's touchstone in his conservative outreach is his father, who struggled every year to meet his company's pension obligations, only to learn years later that big companies like Bethlehem Steel had an exemption in the law so they didn't have to meet the same standards. "Now, from my modern political perspective, that's exactly the thing I think is most outrageous about how the government functions," says Lessig. "And from my dad's perspective, that's the most absurd thing about how government functions."

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MediaDefender, the thugs paid by the entertainment industry to spy on file-sharers and attempt to cripple file-sharing networks, attacked a legitimate Internet TV company called Revision3 over the weekend, launching a massive denial-of-service attack in retaliation for having their spy-bots locked out of R3's BitTorrent trackers:

Revision3 runs a tracker expressly designed to coordinate the sharing and downloading of our shows. It’s a completely legitimate business practice, similar to how ESPN puts out a guide that tells viewers how to tune into its network on DirecTV, Dish, Comcast and Time Warner, or a mall might publish a map of its stores...

A bit of address translation, and we’d discovered our nemesis. But instead of some shadowy underground criminal syndicate, the packets were coming from right in our home state of California. In fact, we traced the vast majority of those packets to a public company called Artistdirect (ARTD.OB). Once we were able to get their internet provider on the line, they verified that yes, indeed, that internet address belonged to a subsidiary of Artist Direct, called MediaDefender.

Who pays MediaDefender to disrupt peer to peer networks? I don’t know who’s ponying up today, but in the past their clients have included Sony, Universal Music, and the central industry groups for both music and movies – the RIAA and MPAA. According to an article by Ars Technica, the company uses “its array of 2,000 servers and a 9GBps dedicated connection to propagate fake files and launch denial of service attacks against distributors.” Another Ars Technica story claims that MediaDefender used a similar denial of service attack to bring down a group critical of its actions...

“Media Defender did not do anything specific, targeted at Revision3″, claims Grodsky. “We didn’t do anything to increase the traffic” – beyond what they’d normally be sending us due to the fact that Revision3 was hosting thousands of MediaDefender torrents improperly injected into our corporate server. His claim: that once we turned off MediaDefender’s back-door access to the server, “traffic piled up (to Revision3 from MediaDefender servers because) it didn’t get any acknowledgment back.”

Putting aside the company’s outrageous use of our servers for their own profit, and the large difference between one connection every three hours and 8,000 packets a second, I’m still left to wonder why they didn’t just tell us our basement window was unlocked. A quick call or email and we’d have locked it up tighter than a drum. ..

If it can happen to Revision3, it could happen to your business too. We’re simply in the business of delivering entertainment and information – that’s not life or death stuff. But what if MediaDefender discovers a tracker inside a hospital, fire department or 911 center? If it happened to us, it could happen to them too. In my opinion, Media Defender practices risky business, and needs to overhaul how it operates. Because in this country, as far as I know, we’re still innocent until proven guilty – not drawn, quartered and executed simply because someone thinks you’re an outlaw.

Link (Thanks, Burris!)

Canadian Member of Parliament Charlie Angus (late of one of my favorite punk acts, L'Etranger) has introduced a private member's bill on Net Neutrality in Canada:

Charlie Angus, who represents Timmins and James Bay, launched his bill one day after 300 people showed up in Ottawa to protest the issue. "You are citizens of a digital realm and you have rights," Angus told the crowd, according to the CBC. The crowd then chanted, "Whose net? Our net!" As a slogan, this leaves something to be desired, but it does get the point across.

Angus wants Parliament to debate the topic, and his brief bill amends Canada's Telecommunications Act to prohibit various forms of discrimination. P2Pnet hosts a copy of the text, which outlaws "network management practices that favour, degrade or prioritise any content, application or service is transmitted over a broadband network based on its source, ownership or destination." Reasonable network management is still allowed, and ISPs are explicitly allowed to charge different prices for different levels of bandwidth.

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Jamie sez, "The League of Noble Peers have been hard at work transcribing STEAL THIS FILM II [a great, remixable documentary about file-sharing and copyright] footage over the last six months, and we're now proud to announce this fully searchable index of the base material from which we made the film. As well as streaming previews, the material is available in HD format under CC-by-SA and we're encouraging people to use it in their own projects. One other thing to note is the cool underlying search technology, which is based on 0xdb.org and pad.ma."

Steal This Film 2 involved extensive research and numerous interviews. Due to time constraints, every documentary uses of only a small portion of the materials collected. Some interviewees, having been so generous in giving us their time, didn't appear at all in the final cut. In most cases this was simply a problem of being forced to focus in on the points we thought most crucial, and the need to arrange many voices into one argument.

This archive is intended to fulfill three objectives. We want to allow those interviewed the time to elaborate their perspectives in more detail, and to return the segments we selected to the context from which they emanated. We hope that these materials can be useful to those in search of greater detail.

Finally, in the spirit of cooperation and sharing, and by agreement with our interviewees, we are making this footage available to others who want to make films on this subject, and who may not have the resources to travel to and meet these exceptional individuals. We hope the HDV Torrents we have provided are of sufficient quality. If you have any issues, please contact us.

Steal This Film is a work in progress, incomplete, open to contradiction and response. The task of talking back to our point of view is one we leave at the feet of you, the viewers, users and produsers of the film.

Link (Thanks, Jamie!)

See also: Steal This Film, Part II: the Internet makes us into copiers

Adrian McCarthy says:

While at the cinema yesterday, I read a notice posted by the box office that Paramount has intentionally silenced bits of the soundtrack of _Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull_ in order to deter and track piracy. The notice acknowledged that the momentary silences were annoying but that it was out of their control. Basically it said, please don't bug the manager if the sound drops out, unless it lasts more than a minute.

I searched this morning, but I can't find any mention of this on the web. I was going to snap a picture of the notice to post on my blog, but my cell phone battery had died--and I probably would have been chased off by a security guard.

Blanking out chunks of audio seems a rather crude way of watermarking the film. Once again, it's the paying customers who suffer.

For reference, it was the Regal Cinema at Hacienda Crossing in Dublin, California. I was there to see Speed Racer in IMAX, so I didn't directly witness tampering with Indiana Jones.

David says

The federal government is secretly negotiating an agreement to revamp international copyright laws which could make the information on Canadian iPods, laptop computers or other personal electronic devices illegal and greatly increase the difficulty of travelling with such devices. The deal would create a international regulator that could turn border guards and other public security personnel into copyright police. The security officials would be charged with checking laptops, iPods and even cellular phones for content that "infringes" on copyright laws, such as ripped CDs and movies.

The guards would also be responsible for determining what is infringing content and what is not.

Canadians, time to write your MP! This was on the front page of the daily tabloid in Vancouver, so hopefully Jim Prentice will be forced to actually consult the public before he sells us all up the river.

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Earlier this week, Ruben Bolling's TOM THE DANCING BUG toon let fly with some trenchant commentary on Disney and copyright. Link (Thanks, Cori!)