Author: Ed Felten
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No Injunction for SearchKing
The judge in the SearchKing v. Google case has denied SearchKing’s request for a preliminary injunction. (See the bottom of this posting for background on the case.) James Grimmelmann at LawMeme analyzes the ruling. The court ruled that Google’s page rankings are opinions and so are protected by the First Amendment. It’s interesting that the…
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More on the Insecurity of Door Locks
Seth Finkelstein has unearthed two previous mentions of the method used in Matt Blaze’s door-lock attack. It’s clear that this problem was known in some circles. Now the rest of us know too. I wrote previously that I’m glad the DMCA doesn’t apply to door locks. Chris Smith, over at Mutatron, wonders whether the DMCA…
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Most Door Locks Insecure
John Schwartz at the New York Times reports on a blockbuster piece of research by cryptographer Matt Blaze. Matt applied the principles of cryptography to good old fashioned door locks and keys, and what he found is pretty horrifying. Given a key to one of the locks in a building, and a small number of…
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Copyright and Rhetoric
In a much-acclaimed blog posting, Doc Searls writes that the limited-copyright folks are losing the rhetorical battle to the copyright expansionists. I believe Hollywood won because they have successfully repositioned copyright as a property issue. In other words, they successfully urged the world to understand copyright in terms of property. Copyright = property may not…
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Court Orders Verizon to Reveal Customer's Identity
U.S. District Court Judge John D. Bates has ordered Verizon to turn over to the RIAA the identity of a Verizon customer who allegedly used Verizon’s ISP service to infringe copyrights on recorded music. Verizon had argued that they should not be compelled to reveal this information. More to come, once I have had a…
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More on Court Tossing No-Reviews EULA Clause
The EFF has posted a copy of the New York state court’s ruling in the Network Associates case that I wrote about previously. The court’s ruling makes three main points. (1) The contract clause, which forbids customers from reviewing the product or publishing the results of benchmarking it, is unenforceable. (The court doesn’t expand on…
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RIAA: ISPs Should Pay For File Sharing
A Reuters story quotes RIAA head Hilary Rosen as saying that ISPs should be held responsible for their users’ file sharing: “We will hold ISPs more accountable,” said Hillary Rosen, chairman and CEO the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), in her keynote speech at the Midem music conference on the French Riviera. “Let’s face…
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Court Throws Out No-Reviews Clause in EULA
A court has thrown out a software contract clause prohibiting customers from publishing reviews of a product, report Matt Richtel at the New York Times and Lisa Bowman at CNet. A New York state court made the ruling in a suit brought by the New York Attorney General’s office. The clause in question says, “The…
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Siva's Multimedia Blitz
Siva Vaidhyanathan offers a post-Eldred perspective over at Salon. He’s on television tonight too, talking about copyright, on “NOW with Bill Moyers,” airing on most PBS stations at 9:00 PM. Also check out his new blog.
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Eldred Loses
The Supreme Court has ruled in the Eldred case, upholding the copyright term extension by a 7-2 vote. More later, once I get a chance to read the opinions. majority opinion by Justice Ginsburg; dissent by Justice Stevens; dissent by Justice Breyer