CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Year: 2002

  • Happy Holidays

    – by

    Comments

    There will be few if any postings here until January 2. Enjoy the holidays, and I’ll see you here next year!

  • DMCA Submission Site

    – by

    Comments

    The U.S. government’s Copyright Office has put up a site containing all of the requested exemptions from the DMCA’s ban on circumvention of access controls. There are fifty submissions in all, including mine. In January, the reply comment period will open. Anyone can submit reply comments, either opposing or supporting any of the requested exemptions.…

  • Take It Easy on Donna Today

    – by

    Comments

    One of the apparent themes this week is the Conspiracy to Silence Donna Wentworth. First, Donna’s great blog, Copyfight, was apparently being blocked by the CyberPatrol web filtering software as “possibly inappropriate content.” Then two issues of Donna’s email newsletter, The Filter, were labeled by SpamAssassin as “probably spam.” (Seth Finkelstein diagnoses the latter problem,…

  • Another Voice on Compulsory Music Licensing

    – by

    Comments

    Over at BoingBoing, Xeni Jardin discusses Ken Hertz’s speech accepting an ACLU Bill of Rights Award. Hertz advocates a compulsory license for online music sharing. (This is something I have discussed (but not endorsed) before.) The significance of this, according to Xeni, is that Ken Hertz has represented several big-name musicians, including Will Smith and…

  • Movie Studios File DMCA Suit Against 321

    – by

    Comments

    According to an AP story by Ron Harris, Seven major motion picture studios filed a counterclaim Thursday in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California against 321 Studios, makers of DVD Copy Plus and DVD X Copy. The software sold at stores nationwide allows the user to make a copy of a DVD to a…

  • My DMCA Exemption Request

    – by

    Comments

    Yesterday was the deadline for submitting to the Librarian of Congress any requests for exemptions from the DMCA’s ban on circumvention of access control technologies. I submitted a request, asking for an exemption for legitimate research study of access control technologies.

  • Law Firm Accused of Computer Intrusion

    – by

    Comments

    According to James Grimaldi’s column in Monday’s Washington Post, lawyers at the prominent firm Jones Day are accused of making unauthorized accesses to the password-protected web site of an opposing expert witness. Grimaldi writes, W. Kelly Stewart, of Jones Day’s Dallas office, testified last month that he entered Egilman’s site after Jones Day attempted and…

  • Apparent Overblocking by CyberPatrol

    – by

    Comments

    Today, while visiting a large company, I tried to visit some of the websites on this site’s link-list. I found that three of them were blocked due to “possibly inappropriate content.” The three blocked sites were Eszter Hargittai’s blog, Arnold Kling’s “The Bottom Line”, and Donna Wentworth’s “CopyFight”. (The whole Corante site, which hosts several…

  • More On Elcomsoft's Acquittal

    – by

    Comments

    Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy explains why ElcomSoft’s ignorance of the law was an excuse in this instance. Also, some are suggesting that jury nullification may have played a role in ElcomSoft’s acquittal. (“Jury nullification” refers to a jury’s refusal to find guilt under a law because they consider that law unjust.) An AP…

  • ElcomSoft Acquitted

    – by

    Comments

    Lisa Bowman at news.com reports that the jury has found ElcomSoft not guilty of criminally violating the DMCA. It will be interesting to watch the reaction to this. Some people may try to read a lot into the verdict, but this is probably a mistake. Apparently, the verdict relied not on the drawbacks of the…