Author: Ed Felten
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Take It Easy on Donna Today
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,…
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Another Voice on Compulsory Music Licensing
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…
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Movie Studios File DMCA Suit Against 321
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…
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My DMCA Exemption Request
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.
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Law Firm Accused of Computer Intrusion
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…
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Apparent Overblocking by CyberPatrol
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…
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More On Elcomsoft's Acquittal
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…
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ElcomSoft Acquitted
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…
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NYT: Wi-Fi Interferes With Military Radars
In today’s New York Times, John Markoff writes that the Wi-Fi standard for wireless networking may interfere with certain military radars. If the interference turns out to be serious, this is a major headache. Wi-Fi is one of the best new technologies to come along in a while, and it seems to be headed for…
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Google in the Spotlight
Interesting article by Josh McHugh in the January 2003 issue Wired, on Google’s attempts to keep itself on the right side of various policy issues. It’s much easier to steer clear of the tough issues when you’re small. Now that Google is so popular and powerful, policy challenges abound.