Month: June 2003
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Petition for Public Domain Enhancement Act
Larry Lessig writes: We have launched a petition to build support for the Public Domain Enhancement Act. That act would require American copyright holders to pay $1 fifty years after a work was published. If they pay the $1, the copyright continues. If they don’t, the work passes into the public domain. Historical estimates would…
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Software Infringement Rate Decreasing
The Business Software Alliance (BSA), a prominent industry group, has announced the results of its annual study of copyright compliance by business software users. According to BSA, 39% of business application software, worldwide, was infringing in 2002. This is down from a high of 49% in 1994. The U.S. was the most law-abiding country, with…
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Palladium as P2P Enabler
A new paper by Stuart Schechter, Rachel Greenstadt, and Mike Smith, of Harvard, points out what should have been obvious all along: that “trusted computing” systems like Microsoft’s now-renamed Palladium, if they work, can be used to make peer-to-peer file sharing systems essentially impervious to technical countermeasures. The reason is that Palladium-like systems allow any…