This is fucking evil. From Wired:

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ordered infamous file-sharer Jammie Thomas-Rasset to pay the recording industry $222,000 for downloading and sharing two dozen copyrighted songs on the now-defunct file-sharing service Kazaa.

More importantly, the appeals court agreed with the Recording Industry Association of America that judges are virtually powerless to reduce a jury’s verdict in a copyright case. The appeals court, however, sidestepped ruling on the issue of whether the RIAA must prove “actual distribution” of songs in addition to merely making them available on a peer-to-peer network.

Unless there’s an appeal, the decision (.pdf) by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals marks the finish to three RIAA trials against the Minnesota woman, who was the nation’s first individual to challenge an RIAA lawsuit in court instead of settling for a few thousand dollars.

The case dates to 2006, and has a tortuous history of three different verdicts for the same offense. Under the case’s latest iteration, a jury last year awarded the RIAA $1.5 million, which the court reduced to $54,000, ruling that the jury’s award for “stealing 24 songs for personal use is appalling.”

The appeals court’s convoluted decision Tuesday, however, found that the $222,000 verdict from the first case should stand and that U.S. District Judge Michael Davis should not have declared a mistrial in that 2007 case over a flawed jury instruction.

In her appeal, Thomas-Rasset argued that the Copyright Act, which allows damages of up to $150,000 per infringement, was unconstitutionally excessive. (.pdf) The Obama administration weighed in too, saying the large damages allowed “is reasonably related to furthering the public interest (.pdf) in protecting original works of artistic literary, and musical expression.”

The only other file-sharer to challenge an RIAA lawsuit was Joel Tenenbaum, a Massachusetts college student. The Supreme Court in May upheld a Boston federal jury’s award of $675,000 for sharing 30 songs.

Most of the thousands of RIAA file sharing cases against individuals settled out of court for a few thousand dollars. The RIAA has ceased its 5-year campaign of suing individual file sharers and, with the Motion Picture Association of America, has convinced internet service providers to take punitive action against copyright scofflaws, including terminating service.

Cnet updates:

Lawyers for Jammie Thomas-Rasset confirmed what many people who have followed her case likely expected.

The Minnesota woman found liable for sharing 24 copyrighted songs via the Web will try and take her case to the U.S. Supreme court, Kiwi Camara, her attorney, told CNET today. It must be noted that there’s no guarantee that the court will hear her case.

Camara was reacting today to a decision from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which found largely in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the trade group representing the four largest music-recording companies. The Appeals court granted an RIAA request to throw out a decision by a lower court to reduce the amount Thomas-Rasset was found liable for by a jury.

Thomas-Rasset’s attorneys asked the Appeals court to determine the constitutionality of the damages award in copyright cases, which are based on statutory rates set by Congress. Camara has said that the awards are cruel and unusual punishment and unconstitutional. The appeals court declined to make the determination.

“We’re happy that [the Appeals court] went with the $222,000 judgment,” Camara told CNET. “Obviously, we’re disappointed with the court’s ruling on the constitutionality of the damages award. “We think they’re punitive.”

— By Akira The Don on Tuesday, September 11th, 2012

From New Scientist:

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs).

“Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,” says James Glattfelder. “Our analysis is reality-based.”

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world’s economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy – whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company’s operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core’s tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. “If one [company] suffers distress,” says Glattfelder, “this propagates.”

“It’s disconcerting to see how connected things really are,” agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system’s behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won’t chime with some of the protesters’ claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. “Such structures are common in nature,” says Sugihara.

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, “is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups”. Or as Braha puts it: “The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy.”

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

When this article was first posted, the comment in the final sentence of the paragraph beginning “Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power…” was misattributed.

The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used

— By Akira The Don on Thursday, August 9th, 2012

Zef, showed me this the other night.

Pretty flipping amazing.

And it raises so many questions!

— By Akira The Don on Monday, July 2nd, 2012

Over the years I have had the following question, or versions of it, a lot:

And so, in this week’s Vlog, recorded in a nice field in Kent when I went wandering off during a wedding and wrote some songs over the sound of the echoing disco, I answer that question!

Enjoy. And if you have any of your own questions for future Vlogs, do let me know.

— Saturday, June 30th, 2012

Over the years I have had the following question, or versions of it, a lot:

And so, in this week’s Vlog, recorded in a nice field in Kent when I went wandering off during a wedding and wrote some songs over the sound of the echoing disco, I answer that question!

Enjoy. And if you have any of your own questions for future Vlogs, do let me know.

Meanwhile, I had one of the loveliest days in London I’ve had in ages today. I was treated to free celebratory coffees by my all knowing barristo (barristos are much more intuative than psychics), I edited that vlog up there, then I got on a train and ran all the way up Crouch Hill for a delicious luncheon of chicken wings and barbecue sauce with my little brother Alexander Velky and his daughter Sybil, who was amazingly well behaved and didn’t throw bits of carrot at the barstaff once.

I then went two stops down the line, running into Video Highway starlett and very tattooed latex clothing designing superstar Nina Kate along the way, which was most fortuitous as I’d been meaning to ring her to find out who’s the best person to ink comic book tattoos these days. Natrually she was on route to visit the wife of a tattooist who also happnes to draw for Marvel comics. Pow.

I met BJ, my Godson Kio, and his big brother Hanzo in Gospel Oak (see above). Hanzo was most enamoured with my glasses, but didn’t want to paddle, and repeated as much until we stopped trying to get him to paddle and went for a nice walk up a hill, upon which we truned around and were stunned by a panoramic view of London, which momentarily stunned us all.

After that I went to Camden to find birthday presents for my six year old neice Sophie Ella De Bun Bun. The place felt more magical than it has since I was first there 14 years ago, full of wonder at the stalls and the punks and the Good Mixer, whihc i’d spent my teens reading and dreaming about. Camden seemed to be dusted with magic today, perfect shops I’m sure never existed before popped up like they do in Terry Pratchett novels and supplied wonderful gifts, I had the best smoothie I think I’ve had that wasn’t made by me, and I couldn’t go five paces without someone stopping to say hi and complement me on my glasses, or my last mixtape.

Now the sun is setting over Nu Olympia, my beautiful wife, just back the future Mrs Velky’s hen night, is radiating happily on the sofa sharing Good News with her sister, and my little brother Zef Cherry Kynaston and his fine young lady person Kelly, who recently moved down from Cornwall to a nice flat a few miles up the road are on their way over to spend the evening with us.

Scrub that, they just turned up, raving about the cable car they took from Victoria to Greenwich this afternoon, so I better go. I realise as I write this that my family, and London, are both things I have taken for granted somewhat over the years. So let me say right now, while this clarity is upon me, I love you Family, and I love you London.

PAX!

@!

— Saturday, June 30th, 2012

More frustrating, but ultimately enthralling news regarding out above ground future… PSFK reports:

A group of Czech engineers and bike enthusiasts are collaborating on making a six-prop flying bicycle powered by a electric motors. In theory as long as the batteries held out the rider would be able to fly above other forms of terrestrial transport. Still in the very early stages of development, 3D models have it operating as a normal bike would on land, but then switching to a vertical take-off and landing mode when flying around.

The design at present involves six motors, one for each propeller, with a theoretical lifting force of 518 pounds. Estimated flight time could be around three to five minutes, and the design requires the rider to be strapped into the bike. The designers don’t plan for the bike to ever go into commercial production, intending it purely for promotional purposes. Perhaps that’s for the best. If you’re in the Czech Republic, keep your eyes on the sky for the first round of test flights this August.

— By Akira The Don on Monday, June 25th, 2012