Author: Ed Felten
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Preliminary Injunction Against Aimster
A Federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction against the Aimster file sharing service. The judge found it likely that Aimster will ultimately (after all the evidence is heard) be found liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. Based on a quick reading, it looks like this is based on Aimster’s involvement in promoting the…
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Defense of Berman-Coble Bill Offered
In Politech today, Congressman Berman (through an aide) offers a defense of the proposed Berman-Coble bill. (This bill would legalize certain forms of hacking by copyright owners against users of file-sharing systems.) The gist of the defense is that the bill would only shelter copyright holders from liability to the extent that they were actually…
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Adobe Files DMCA Challenge
Adobe has filed a federal lawsuit seeking a declaratory judgment that its Acrobat product does not violate the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions. (Here’s Adobe’s press release. I don’t have a link to the court papers yet.) Here is the story, as far as I can tell at this point: Any TrueType-compatible font can be labeled with…
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R.I.P. Napster
A judge has nixed Bertelsmann’s purchase of Napster. This looks like the end of the road for Napster. From now on Napster will be nothing but a cautionary example – though precisely what cautionary lesson it offers, and to whom, will be a subject of vigorous debate.
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Source Code and Object Code
[This item is long and geeky. Sorry about that. I hope that at least some of you will find it interesting. The rest of you can skip right to the (slightly) pithier items below.] When lawyers discuss software, they typically draw distinctions between source code and object code. These distinctions often fail to account for…
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Misleading Term of the Week: "Content Owner"
Many discussions of copyright refer to “content owners.” The language of ownership is often misused in these contexts, for example by saying that Disney “owns” The Lion King, or by saying that I “own” the content on this site. The simple fact is that I don’t own the content on this site – at least…
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Greece Bans Electronic Games
CNet reports that Greece has banned all electronic games, including ones that run on PCs or on mobile phones, apparently in an effort to crack down on gambling. This is yet another example of the inflationary theory of censorship. A ban on gambling would be too hard to enforce, because there is no way to…
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Sites Blocked In China
Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman at Harvard have a site listing URLs that are blocked in China. In addition to some obvious sites (related to things like Chinese dissidents, the Taiwanese government, and Falun Gong), there are some curious sites on the block list, including the U.S. Federal Court system (uscourts.gov). You can go to…
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The Inflationary Theory of Censorship
China’s recent decision to block its citizens’ access to Google has been much discussed. Google does not itself offer “subversive” content, so the goal must have been to keep people from finding “subversive” content from elsewhere. This illustrates a general truth about attempts to censor general-purpose communication technologies like the Net. These technologies are so…
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Apple Uses DMCA Threat Against Competing Product
Declan McCullagh at news.com reports on Apple’s use of a DMCA threat to force a useful product off the market. Apple’s iDVD application allows the user to burn DVDs – but only on Apple-brand drives. A DVD drive vendor called Other World Computing shipped its drives with a “DVD Enabler” program that modified iDVD so…