Greens Give Thumbs Up To GSMA's Universal Phone Charger

The GSMA's plan to implement an industry-wide standard for a universal mobile phone charger by 2012 is "great news," but standardizing power supplies across the full spectrum of consumer electronic products still requires aggressive action, according to one very interested vendor of such products.

"We've been at this for three years, evangelizing the need for interoperable power supplies," said Paul Panepinto, sales and marketing chief at San Ramon, Calif.-based Green Plug. "Without a doubt, things need to happen more quickly. It personally offends me that the average user [of CE products] throws away 300 power adapters in their lifetime."

At the GSMA's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Tuesday, the industry group said that 17 of its members have agreed to a universal charging solution (UCS) for mobile phones based around Micro-USB as the charging interface. Green Plug, manufacturer of a "universal connector" that pairs any electronic device with any power supply, hopes the GMSA and bodies like the Open Handset Alliance will call for similar standards for other devices -- from printers to cordless power tools, Panepinto said.

Why all the concern? The company cites recent studies that found 3.2 billion new power supplies being manufactured worldwide in 2008 even as some two billion older ones were going into landfill.

"Nobody benefits from this, not consumers, not manufacturers, not the environment," Panepinto said.

To achieve more standardization like Tuesday's GSMA initiative, he's hoping Green Plug can secure a big-name vendor win for its GreenTalk protocol.

"We need a major adopter to drive this market forward. We have to get to a tipping point and others will follow. We hope that HP and Sony are listening. We hope Wal-Mart puts up a quote [supporting Green Plug's efforts] on our Web site," Panepinto said.

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Prosecutor drops a charge in Pirate Bay case

Huge win for the Pirate Bay in the Swedish prosecution of the BitTorrent search engine: The prosecutor has dropped one of the major charges against the four men who run the Bay, IT World reports.

Prosecutors dropped a charge for aiding in the copying of copyright works, because they couldn’t prove copies of the content were made. The music industry blustered:

It’s a largely technical issue that changes nothing in terms of our compensation claims and has no bearing whatsoever on the main case against The Pirate Bay. In fact it simplifies the prosecutor’s case by allowing him to focus on the main issue, which is the making available of copyrighted works,” [industry lawyer Peter Danowsky] said in a statement.

Ummmm … “making available”? I have no idea what Swedish law says, although I believe European law comports with U.S. Copyright law, which pretty clearly has been interpreted as requiring an actual distribution. Read back on the fate of the “making available” theory here and here and here.

Evidence presented on Tuesday included screenshots showing computers were connected to The Pirate Bay’s tracker, or software that coordinates P-to-P (peer-to-peer) file sharing. But a majority of the screenshots show that The Pirate Bay was actually down at the time and that the client connections timed out. The clients, or peers, were still connecting with each other, but through a distributed hash table, another protocol for coordinating downloads unrelated to The Pirate Bay.

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