Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said on Thursday she supported allowing cities and states to tax online purchases, but she would not mandate it.
Clinton, who took questions from mayors at an event in South Carolina, said she thought it was worth experimenting with Internet sales taxes and that she would not stand in the way of jurisdictions that wanted to try it.
Twitter Inc said on Wednesday a fraternity house-themed party thrown by its employees, which was criticized as representing a male-dominated culture in Silicon Valley, was "in poor taste."
A Twitter spokeswoman declined to provide details on the event, but a purported photo of the bash uploaded to social media showed a party replete with red plastic cups, a keg, and a beer pong table adorned with the Twitter logo.
The event comes as the microblogging company faces a proposed class action lawsuit from a former female software engineer claiming the company's promotion process unlawfully favors men.
"This social event organized by one team was in poor taste at best, and not reflective of the culture we are building here at Twitter," the spokeswoman said in a statement. "We've had discussions internally with the organizing team, and they recognize that this theme was ill-chosen."
News outlet Fusion was the first to report on the shindig early on Wednesday, saying the company's revenue team threw the party on Tuesday in San Francisco.
Fusion reported that a photo of the event, uploaded onto Twitter by a female employee, was quickly deleted. The image was tweeted again, however, by the group Global Tech Women, along with the hashtags #diversitymatters and #brogrammers.
In March, former software engineer Tina Huang sued the company saying it has no formal procedures for posting job openings or granting promotions, relying instead on a secretive "shoulder tap" process that elevates few women to top engineering positions.
Twitter said Huang resigned voluntarily and that company leadership had tried to persuade her to stay, adding that she was treated fairly.
Microsoft announced Wednesday it was joining an effort to curb so-called "revenge porn," by helping victims remove links to sexually explicit images of them posted without their consent.
"When someone shares intimate images of another person online without that person's consent, the effects can be truly devastating," said Microsoft chief online safety office Jacqueline Beauchere in a blog post.
"Unfortunately, revenge porn is on the rise across the globe. It can damage nearly every aspect of a victim's life: relationships, career, social activities. In the most severe and tragic cases, it has even led to suicide."
Beauchere said Microsoft has honored requests to take down such content, but that it has now established a new reporting page that makes the process easier.
The page is currently available in English "and will be expanded to other languages in the coming weeks," Beauchere said. "When we remove links or content, we will do so globally."
Google, Twitter, Reddit and others have implemented similar policies.
"Clearly, this reporting mechanism is but one small step in a growing and much-needed effort across the public and private sectors to address the problem," Beauchere said.
"It's important to remember, for example, that removing links in search results to content hosted elsewhere online doesn't actually remove the content from the Internet -- victims still need stronger protections across the Web and around the world."
A year ago, bitcoin was widely dismissed as little more than a way for drug-dealers and terrorists to move money around anonymously. Now, some of the world's biggest banks and companies are buying into the technology behind it.
Underlying the controversial web-based "cryptocurrency" is the blockchain - a massive ledger of every bitcoin transaction ever made that is verified and shared by a global network of computers.
But the data that can be secured by the blockchain is not restricted to bitcoin transactions. Any two parties could use it to exchange other information, including stock deals, legal contracts and property records, within minutes and with no need for a third party to verify it.
Backers say it could cut out the middleman and help fight corruption, as the process by which the data is secured makes it virtually impossible to tamper with. Banks reckon it could save them money by making their operations faster, more efficient and more transparent.
But these are early days - bitcoin was invented just six years ago - and the blockchain is still being experimented with. As is often the case with new technology, as when Apple released the iPad, it is not clear what problem it solves.
Peter Kirby, CEO of Texas blockchain-focused start-up Factom, likened the technology's stage of development to that of the internet in the early 1990s, when it was seen as little more than a way to send emails.
"Here we are again in the email for the internet era, and everyone's like, 'Oh, it's all about moving money through the world.' No. It's about a giant distributed ledger that you can write anything to and never unwrite it."
Factom is using the blockchain to build a permanent and secure land title record in Honduras, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, where land-grabbing and corruption are rife.
SHARED LEDGER
Every 10 minutes, a "block" of bitcoin transactions is verified by thousands of computers, mainly in places where the substantial energy needed to power them is cheap, such as China and Iceland. That block of data is then layered on top of the previous one to form a "chain".
Because the ledger thus created is shared by all of them, if anyone wants to go back and change any of the data, they would have to change every single copy of it, making the blockchain all but tamper-proof.
That also solves the problem of money being spent more than once, something that has plagued earlier attempts to create digital currencies. This is an advance that makes the blockchain a "key technological innovation", according to the Bank of England, which has a dedicated team looking into the technology.
In June, U.S. exchange operator Nasdaq said it was exploring new ways for shares to be issued and transferred, while Reuters disclosed earlier this year that IBM was looking at creating a digital cash and payment system using the blockchain.
BANKING ON THE BLOCKCHAIN
In recent months, major banks such as UBS, Barclays, ING, Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon have announced ventures into blockchain technology.
The potential for transactions to be settled in minutes, rather than days, with fraud or hacking almost impossible, is drawing banks in. That, and the desire not to be left behind.
"We'd rather disrupt ourselves before somebody else does," said ING's global head of transaction services, Mark Buitenhek.
"Our approach ... is just to start doing it, and in a year's time, we'll see," he said. "If it takes off, it takes off, and if it doesn't, it doesn't."
With banks under increased regulatory scrutiny, the ability to prove via an immutable record that their trillions of dollars of daily transactions have been carried out in clients' best interests, not just their own, could prove invaluable.
"The spin-offs from bitcoin are limitless," said Adam Vaziri, a board member of the UK Digital Currency Association. "Using the blockchain (will) avoid any manipulation of records."
The Federal Aviation Administration said Tuesday it was investigating an online video that shows an alleged home-made "drone" firing a handgun in the Connecticut countryside.
The 14-second video called "Flying Gun" shows a homemade multi-rotor hovering off the ground, buzzing furiously and firing a semiautomatic handgun four times at an unseen target.
It was posted on YouTube on July 10 and has been watched nearly two million times. It was filmed by 18-year-old Austin Haughwout from Clinton, Connecticut.
Haughwout is studying for a degree in mechanical engineering. Neither he nor police could be reached for immediate comment.
"The FAA will investigate the operation of an unmanned aircraft system in a Connecticut park to determine if any Federal Aviation Regulations were violated," it said in a statement.
"The FAA will also work with its law enforcement partners to determine if there were any violations of criminal statutes."
But Haughwout's father denied his son had built a drone, which he said are pre-programmed, and said this device was manually controlled.
"People have been playing with RC (remote-controlled) toys for many decades," he told AFP by telephone.
"The proper name for this is an RC quadcopter. The media keeps using the inappropriate word because it helps you to generate fear," he added.
Haughwout said the FAA had made no contact with his family.
"I don't understand why people are making such a big deal of it. It's not like it's anything new," he said.
"He's a mechanical engineering student. He builds all different kind of things."
Facebook Inc cannot challenge search warrants New York prosecutors used to get information from its site on hundreds of users suspected of Social Security fraud, a state appeals court said on Tuesday, in a decision likely making it harder for New Yorkers to keep their digital lives private.
The warrants, which applied to 381 users' photos, private messages and other account information, could only be challenged by individual defendants after prosecutors gathered evidence, the Manhattan-based court unanimously ruled.
Facebook was backed in the case by a group of large Internet companies including Google Inc and Microsoft Corp, which argued the case could set a troubling precedent giving prosecutors access to all kinds of digital information.
Internet companies are pushing back broadly against U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies' demands for customer data, in the wake of revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden of wide-ranging online surveillance.
The Manhattan District Attorney's office served the warrants on Facebook in 2013, seeking information on dozens of people later indicted for Social Security fraud, including police officers and firefighters who allegedly feigned illness in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
The world's biggest online social network turned the records over to prosecutors last year after a state judge threw out its claim that the warrants violated users' Fourth Amendment rights, but it also went ahead with an appeal.
The court on Tuesday said the only way to challenge warrants was for defendants in criminal cases to move to suppress the evidence they produced.
A Facebook spokesman said the company disagreed with the decision and was considering an appeal.
A spokeswoman for the district attorney's office said prosecutors had secured nearly $25 million from people who were targets in the probe.
"In many cases, evidence on their Facebook accounts directly contradicted the lies the defendants told to the Social Security Administration," she said.
Prosecutors said Facebook pages showed public employees who claimed to be disabled riding jet skis, playing golf and participating in martial arts events.
Mariko Hirose, a lawyer with the New York Civil Liberties Union, which also submitted a brief in support of Facebook, said the court "side-stepped" an important question by ruling on Facebook's right to challenge the warrants and not on their legality.
The case is: In re 381 search warrants directed to Facebook Inc and dated July 23, 2013, Appellate Division, First Department, No. 30207-13.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Bill Rigby)
Joshua Greenberg, the 28-year-old co-founder of the music streaming website Grooveshark, was found dead in his home in Gainesville, Florida, over the weekend, police said on Monday.
Greenberg was found on Sunday evening and there was no evidence of foul play or suicide at the scene, Gainesville police said in a tweet.
The Gainesville Sun newspaper reported on its website that Greenberg was found in his bed by his live-in girlfriend.
His mother, Lori Greenberg, told the paper that an autopsy found no cause of death pending toxicology testing which could take several months.
Florida-based Grooveshark, which had some 35 million users of its music streaming service, ceased operations on April 30 as part of a settlement with major record labels over copyright infringement.
Greenberg co-founded Grooveshark in 2006 while he was still an undergraduate at the University of Florida.
(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Sandra Maler)
A new study demonstrated that male video-game players who are not very skilled are more likely to lash out against female players they encounter during the same game, the Washington Post reported.
"We suggest that low-status males increase female-directed hostility to minimize the loss of status as a consequence of hierarchical reconfiguration resulting from the entrance of a woman into the competitive arena," researchers Michael Kasumovic and Jeffrey Kuznekoff stated in their study, which was originally published in the journal PLOS One.
Kasumovic and Kuznekoff used the online multi-player game Halo 3, in which players can form teams of up to four people at a time, as the focus of the study. Because the game allows for audio communication via headphones during play, they used various accounts that uttered phrases like "good game everyone" and "nice shot" recorded in both male and female voices and gauged the responses during 163 multi-player matches.
"We show that lower-skilled players were more hostile towards a female-voiced teammate, especially when performing poorly," the study reads. "In contrast, lower-skilled players behaved submissively towards a male-voiced player in the identical scenario. This difference in gender-directed behaviour became more extreme with poorer focal-player performance."
Kasumovic, who works at the University of New South Wales, told Wired UK that, because Halo 3 allows for anonymous game play, participants were more likely to behave more freely than they would in work environments.
"I think Halo 3 is an excellent example simply because it is so representative of many of the social environments women can experience in many STEM fields and other male dominated work places," he said.
While lower-skilled players were more likely to harass female counterparts, the study reported, higher-skilled players were found to be more welcoming toward them.
"As higher-skilled players have less to fear from hierarchical reorganization, we argue that these males behave more positively in an attempt to support and garner a female player's attention," it read.
Video streaming service provider Hulu is exploring plans to add an advertisement-free option to its service for a monthly subscription of about $12-$14, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Codenamed "NOAH", which expands to "No Ads Hulu", the ad-free service may be launched as early as this fall, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
However, Hulu's owners still believe in the ad-supported version of the service and aim to use data to make advertising more relevant to viewers, the newspaper said.
Hulu is a joint venture owned by Comcast Corp's NBCUniversal, 21st Century Fox Inc's Fox Broadcasting, and Walt Disney Co's ABC.
Representatives of Hulu, Walt Disney, Comcast and 21st Century Fox could not be reached for comment outside regular business hours.
(Reporting by Ankush Sharma in Bengaluru; Editing by Anupama Dwivedi)
Reddit finally began contending with the hate-filled parts of its popular internet free-for-all on Thursday, as new leadership vowed to crack down on the site’s baroque selection of pornography and to isolate other “content that violates a common sense of decency”.
Dozens of so-called “subreddits” devoted to images and fantasies of rape and violence have now vanished, less than one week after Reddit’s female chief executive departed amid a chorus of death threats and slurs from the site’s notoriously toxic users.
Hours after ousted interim CEO Ellen Pao emerged to declare that “the trolls are winning”, her replacement took to the vibrant forums that both power and taint global online discussions, warning users that Reddit would soon ban spam, incitement, bullying and images suggestive of child abuse along with anything “actually illegal, such as copyrighted material”.
But Steve Huffman, the new interim CEO and Reddit co-founder, stopped well short of a full-on purge, appearing to allow the continued existence of the site’s sizeable and seedy underbelly.
“We believe there is value in letting all views exist, even if we find some of them abhorrent, as long as they don’t pollute people’s enjoyment of the site,” Huffman wrote in an Ask Me Anything session on Thursday.
Related: 'What did you expect?' Women in tech reflect on Ellen Pao's exit from Reddit
Huffman said the subreddit “r/rapingwomen” would be banned and that other inappropriate content would become more difficult to find. Threads like “r/coontown” and “r/PhilosophyofRape”, however, remained, as will discussion of illegal activities such as drug use.
“There are many subreddits whose contents I and many others find offensive,” Huffman wrote, “but that alone is not justification for banning.”
The policy shift demonstrated an awakening within Reddit to a long acknowledged problem: the site might not be able to survive without the unpaid labor of a teeming sewer of neo-Nazis, rape enthusiasts, corpse fetishists and the bullies and trolls who have helped to drive away senior employees – many of them women – including Pao, who often stood up for the users’ right to express themselves however they wanted.
In an email exchange with the Guardian, Huffman said he “had almost no involvement with reddit during the Ellen months”. But ahead of his new content mandate on Thursday, labor lawyers and civil rights groups told the Guardian they viewed the site’s practices as undoubtedly suspect in terms of ethics – and questioned whether or not Reddit could exist without them.
In any case, it appeared white supremacists and rape fetishists had already found new places to go.
Related: How Ellen Pao lost her job but survived Reddit's swamp of trolls
Pao, who became an international emblem for women in technology when she lost a landmark gender discrimination lawsuit earlier this year, resigned on Friday after a torrent of abuse following the dismissal of a popular administrator, Victoria Taylor.
Taylor was a Reddit employee and point of contact for the many unpaid Reddit moderators – or “mods” – in charge of allowing discussions to continue, even amid a torrent of abusive discussions and topics. The mods shut down forums including the popular Q&A board “r/AMA” in protest.
On Thursday, Pao spoke out about the end of her eight-month tenure at the company in detail for the first time since her resignation.
“Expecting Internet platforms to eliminate hate and harassment is likely to disappoint”, she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed , arguing that Reddit’s popularity – the site had 164 million unique visitors last month – had become a stumbling block. “If mistakes are made 0.01 percent of the time, that could mean tens of thousands of mistakes.”
“Balancing free expression with privacy and the protection of participants has always been a challenge for open-content platforms on the Internet,” Pao wrote. “But that balancing act is getting harder. The trolls are winning.”
While the trolls may be winning and the so-called “mods” culled from Reddit rabble remain in control, Huffman and his co-founder insisted on Wednesday that was not created to be a “bastion of free speech ”.
In response – in fact, in the same Reddit thread – Pao’s predecessor, Yishan Wong, put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Reddit users themselves: “We tried to let you govern yourselves”, he wrote, “and you failed.”
One synecdoche for the site’s trouble with trolls is the subreddit “r/Catholic”, which allows earnest Christians to hold forth on their personal struggles – sometimes with relationships or sexuality, sometimes with the church’s decisions or policy.
With the sole exception of a cartoon-loving user named platinum4, all of the Catholic subreddit’s moderators also oversaw forums devoted to rape, race hatred or gore – sometimes all of the above. One subreddit with five overlapping r/Catholic moderators was r/cutefemalecorpses; r/beatingwomen was also popular among them. (Under the new policy, the latter sub-forums has been eliminated. The former has not.)
There is moderator overlap between r/CountryMusic and r/TrayvonMartin; between r/Gaza and r/PicsofDeadKids; between r/AdventureTime and a subreddit featuring X-rated cartoons of the popular children’s show, r/ATPorn. Subreddits usually have multiple moderators – often more than a dozen – and mods often oversee dozens of communities.
In the email exchange with the Guardian on Wednesday, Huffman declined to detail his concerns with hate speech in the Reddit community, saving them for his mea culpa in the AMA on Thursday.
But he said the site would “be adding more tools for both moderators and the community managers we employ at reddit”.
“I think we can save everyone a lot of time,” Huffman wrote.
Reddit has also been a windfall for the growing online communities of white supremacists around the US and the world.
When discussion of valueless subreddits arises, as it did on Thursday, users have been quick to ask the site’s administrators why the notoriously hate-filled sub-reddit “r/Coontown” is still allowed to exist.
In the days following Pao’s departure – in which she said hate speech from users directed at her “made me doubt humanity” – the regulars on that particular racist forum had begun anticipating a ban.
Even after Thursday’s massive policy shift, it remained.
“People who are in reddit already, when they stumble on [one of the many racist subreddits], get this immersive experience of being surrounded by all this white supremacist content,” said Keegan Hankes of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups.
As one user pointed out during Huffman’s Q&A session on Thursday, “r/Coontown” approaches the white supremacist site Stormfront.org in terms of traffic.
Huffman said he was baffled by the notion that Reddit could solve its problem with hate groups by quarantining them. “Why would Reddit do that?” Hankes asked. “Why would they lend their name and the legitimacy that comes with that? Reddit’s a household name. That’s almost more disturbing than how it’s operating now. Then you lose the idea that the good voices even out the bad.”
Along the side of the “r/Coontown” main page are links to communities that have even fewer rules, including the group’s chat network on the web client Kiwi IRC, which often exists as a kind of shadow discussion forum alongside Reddit communities.
“I don’t have any issue with the type of users coming into Kiwi,” the client’s co-founder, Darren Whitlen, wrote in an email on Thursday, saying that the site was seeing an increase in traffic from Reddit as the content debate has raged.
On Kiwi, the would-be exiles from “r/Coontown” seemed energized by what they saw as persecution: “I do think the biggest thing holding us back about Reddit is we can’t act,” wrote one user. “But without reddit we’d be a force to contend with.”
“It turns out they didn’t have to worry, so they celebrated. Even before the AMA concluded, r/Coontown had a new header on its page, with a mocking “reddit seal of approval” on it.
Reddit remains a weak hitter, financially speaking: it has those 164 million unique users, by its own accounting – not far behind Buzzfeed’s 192 million – but it made just $8.3m last year. BuzzFeed broke the $100m mark before Thanksgiving, even as it mines Reddit for source material .
In his email to the Guardian on Thursday, Huffman called the attention from news organizations “[o]n one hand flattering, on the other frustrating” and suggested improving the notoriously low-tech site: “Better sharing functionality should help with this,” he wrote.
Of course, none of Reddit’s moderators are paid – just its administrators, who remain a separate and much smaller group. The moderators’ primary reward for managing high-traffic sections of the site – such as the celebrity AMAs – is the ability to act as super-users, managing powerful, high-traffic fiefdoms.
“It seems odd that so much of the business of the company is being done by unpaid workers,” said Juno Turner, a labor lawyer at Outten & Golden.
Jonathan Segal, of the firm Duane Morris, said trolls and racists might “be less sympathetic, but I’ve been surprised by some of the people that government agencies have found sympathetic”.
Labor concerns don’t yet appear to trouble the company. On Thursday, Huffman told Redditors, his primary concern is making sure the site’s basement does not cause trouble with the rest of the site.
“[The new policy] is what we will try,” he wrote, “and if the hateful users continue to spill out into mainstream reddit, we will try more aggressive approaches.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2015
A U.S. judge ruled on Thursday that online television service FilmOn X LLC should be treated like a traditional cable system in order to transmit the programs of the nation's broadcasters over the Internet.
The ruling, coming as consumer TV-watching habits are increasingly migrating to the Internet, is the first to first to view a streaming service like a cable provider and could have major implications for broadcasters if it is upheld by higher courts.
Broadcasters have been aggressively litigating against such services, contending they violate their copyrights and threaten their ability to generate advertising and control subscription fees.
U.S. District Judge George Wu in Los Angeles said in his ruling that FilmOn X is entitled to a compulsory license under the Copyright Act to retransmit the broadcasters' programs if it meets the law's requirements.
Acknowledging the major commercial consequences of his decision, Wu said he would allow an immediate appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
He also left in place an injunction against FilmOn X's operations that the broadcasters had won in 2012, so FilmOn will still not able to stream their content pending the appeal.
"The broadcasters have been trying to keep their foot on the throat of innovation," said FilmOn X's lawyer, Ryan Baker, in an interview. "The court’s decision today is a win for technology and for the American public."
In a statement, Fox Networks said the opinion "contravenes all legal precedent" and vowed to appeal.
The dispute stems from two lawsuits that Fox, Walt Disney Co's ABC network, CBS Corp, Comcast Corp's NBCUniversal and several others filed against FilmOn X in 2012.
The networks successfully shut down Aereo, a more prominent competitor to FilmOn X, when the U.S. Supreme Court in June, 2014 said that company violated the broadcasters' copyrights in retransmitting their programs to subscribers' devices via the Internet.
Aereo then tried to argue in a Manhattan federal court it should be seen as analogous to cable, eligible for a compulsory license. The judge in that case disagreed. The company, backed by Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp, has since gone bankrupt.
Both Aereo and FilmOn X, founded by Internet entrepreneur Alki David, use similar technology that allows viewers to watch network television captured via remote antennas and sent over the Internet.
The case is Fox Television Stations, Inc v. FilmOn X, LLC, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, No. 12-cv-6921.
(By Andrew Chung. Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
Authors including Malcolm Gladwell, Ursula Le Guin, Michael Chabon and Ann Patchett are putting their names to a letter attacking Amazon’s “abuse of its dominance in the world of books” and calling on the US justice department to investigate the retailer’s “power over the book market”.
The letter, which is due to be submitted to the department later this month , is the latest initiative from the group of powerful authors calling themselves Authors United, which was set up in the wake of the dispute over terms between the internet shopping site and Hachette last year . Douglas Preston, who founded the group, said that signatories were “pouring in” for the letter this week, with “many hundreds” putting their name to the letter, including Sara Paretsky, Francis Fukuyama, Elizabeth George, Michael Lewis, Richard North Patterson, Luc Sante, Stuart Woods and Daniel Handler.
“We are authors with a deep collective experience in this field, and we agree with the authorities in economics and law who have asserted that Amazon’s dominant position makes it a monopoly as a seller of books and a monopsony as a buyer of books,” runs the letter, going on to claim that “in recent years, Amazon has used its dominance in ways that we believe harm the interests of America’s readers, impoverish the book industry as a whole, damage the careers of (and generate fear among) many authors, and impede the free flow of ideas in our society”.
The authors are calling for the justice department’s antitrust division to investigate Amazon, suggesting that the online retailer “has blocked and curtailed the sale of millions of books by thousands of authors” in order to pressure publishers, and has “extract[ed] an ever greater share of the total price of a book from publishers”, resulting in “publishers dropping some midlist authors and not publishing certain riskier books, effectively silencing many voices”.
The letter is backed by missives from the Authors Guild and the American Booksellers Association, the New York Times reported. “As with our author colleagues, we are concerned that the mega-book-retailer Amazon.com has achieved such considerable market power with such questionable business tactics that it is undermining the ecosystem of the entire book industry in a way that will be detrimental, especially to midlist authors, new authors, and minority voices,” wrote both the president and the chief executive of the ABA in a letter to the justice department printed by the paper .
This latest salvo comes after a series of long-running battles between the internet giant and the world’s biggest publishing conglomerates, with the retailer accused of delaying delivery for high-profile titles . As negotiations over ebook sales between Amazon and Hachette turned into a public war of words , authors stepped into the ring , publishing rival petitions in support of both sides. The Hachette dispute was resolved last November , with the retailer suggesting the deal would be a “great win for readers and writers alike” and the publisher claiming it would “benefit Hachette authors for years to come”.
Preston told the Guardian that Authors United, whose actions during the stand-off included funding an ad in the New York Times asking Amazon “to stop harming the livelihood of the authors”, had waited until now to put its letter together “because, first, we wanted to take our time with the research (which is hard to do because Amazon is a very secretive company) and also to give a little breathing room after the dispute was settled”.
“We wanted to wait for tempers to cool and not charge back on the field of battle, giving the impression were disgruntled authors still angry over the way Amazon treated us. The truth is, Amazon’s heavy control and aggressive dominance of the publishing world is a much larger issue than the Hachette dispute,” said the novelist.
Amazon, which last month saw the EU launch an inquiry into its dominance of the ebook market , did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday morning.
For the founder of the Alliance of Independent Authors , Orna Ross, the Authors United letter ignores Amazon’s leading role in the development of self-publishing.
“Monopolies are never good for any business,” she said. “We encourage our members to publish in as many formats as possible, on as many platforms as possible. Having said that, I don’t believe the situation as described by the Authors Guild is that experienced by all authors. Many of the concerns that are expressed in the letter around freedom of expression are actually solved by self-publishing.”
Amazon’s introduction of Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) has allowed many authors “to reach their audience and allowed others to build successful businesses, new genres and wide global readerships,” she continued.
“The Authors Guild doesn’t seem to understand how self-publishing works. Some of the figures it is quoting are inaccurate and KDP’s restrictions on pricing are actually designed to avoid a race to the bottom, not the opposite as implied.”
“Amazon is a business, doing what businesses do,” she said. “We might deplore that but we can’t have it both ways. Authors associations should speak out on behalf of authors and readers, not publishers.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2015
Toshiba Corp Chief Executive Hisao Tanaka will step down in September along with other board members including Vice Chairman Norio Sasaki to take responsibility for accounting irregularities, sources familiar with the matter said.
The Japanese conglomerate has hired a third-party committee to investigate past book-keeping practices, and sources have said the probe was focusing on the role top officials played in the irregularities.
Over half of the board was likely to be replaced at the company's next shareholders' meeting in September, sources said on Wednesday, declining to be named because they were not authorized to speak with media.
A Toshiba spokeswoman said the company had not yet made any decision on the matter and was waiting for the third-party committee to release its findings.
The Nikkei business daily earlier reported that Toshiba was expected to announce Tanaka's resignation when the report was released next week.
The laptops-to-nuclear conglomerate first disclosed accounting irregularities in early April, two months after financial regulators ordered a report on past bookkeeping. It has been unable to close its books for the past financial year in the meantime and suspended its year-end dividend.
Sources said previously that investigators' central theory is that executives, worried about the impact of the 2011 Fukushima disaster on its nuclear unit, set overly aggressive targets in new businesses such as smart meters and electronic toll booths, encouraging the understating of costs and overestimating of revenue.
(Reporting by Reiji Murai and Ritsuko Ando in Tokyo; Additional reporting by Abhirup Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel and Stephen Coates)
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