Year: 2003
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Grokster Ruling: Instant Analysis
Judge Wilson’s opinion, dismissing the music industry suit against Grokster and Morpheus, contains few surprises beyond the result itself. Judge Wilson ruled, essentially, that although some users of the defendants’ P2P software used the software to infringe copyrights, this infringing activity was beyond the control of the defendants. Unlike Napster, these defendants had no active,…
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Judge Rules Morpheus, Grokster Legal to Distribute
A Federal court has granted summary judgment in favor of Grokster et al., ruling that it is legal to distribute these peer-to-peer file sharing tools. More later, after I have had a chance to read the ruling.
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Florida Super-DMCA Back On the Fast Track
Giles Hoover writes that the Florida version of the Super-DMCA has been put on a fast-track “Special Order Calendar”, to be voted on tomorrow. Florida residents, call your representatives and weigh in on this bill!
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Costs vs. Benefits
Yesterday, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference had a session on the copy protection wars. Louis Trager reports, in a story headlined “Hollywood Survival Isn’t Worth Sacrificing Tech Freedom, Activists Say”, in today’s Washington Internet Daily: Legal restrictions on technology and content copying pose a far greater risk to society than the extinction of the established…
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Texas Trying to Sneak Through Super-DMCA
The Texas state legislature has reportedly suspended its rules today in order to consider the Super-DMCA legislation without the usually-required five days advance notice. This looks like an attempt to get the bill passed without allowing opponents a chance to properly debate it. The legislative hearing is expected to start around 6:00 PM (Central time)…
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Rounding
Cory Doctorow writes on Cruelty to Analog about an MPAA presentation to the ARDG, the group that is trying to bring Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to analog content. The presentation talks about a “rounding problem” that arises because of an assumption that analog DRM is unable to micromanage the use of content to the same…
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Slashdot Interview
My Slashdot interview was just posted. Slashdot readers asked me several interesting questions about law and technology.
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What Was Blackboard Thinking?
Most businesses know that it’s wise to honor the values of their customers. So you’ve got to wonder what Blackboard was thinking when it sued to block a conference presentation last weekend. Blackboard’s customers are colleges and universities. As Karl-Friedrich Lenz observes, these are organizations that hold freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry as…
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Students Write About RIAA/Student Lawsuits
Two of the best sources on the RIAA vs. student lawsuits come, appropriately, from other students. Joe Barillari, a student in my “Information Technology and the Law” course at Princeton, has written an interesting analysis of the case against his fellow Princeton student Dan Peng. [Annoying disclaimer: Joe doesn’t speak for me; I don’t speak…
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LaBrea Unavailable Due To Illinois SuperDMCA
Tom Liston, the author of the award-winning LaBrea security software, has announced that he will no longer make LaBrea available, because of concerns over the Super-DMCA, which has already become law in his native Illinois. Network administrators can use LaBrea to set up a kind of virtual tarpit that entangles attempts by outsiders to scan…