Category: Uncategorized
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How To Annoy Your Mother-in-Law
Look up her age here. Then send her an email informing her that anyone on the Net can do the same. UPDATE (9:00 PM): How to run up your mother-in-law’s AOL bill: tell her she can look up her friends’ ages.
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Privacy, Blogging, and Conflict of Interest
Blogging can create the most interesting conflicts of interest. Here is a particularly juicy example: William Safire’s column in today’s New York Times questions the motives of the new LifeLog program at DARPA. (DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is the part of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) that funds external research and…
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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…
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SearchKing Suit Dismissed
Stefanie Olsen at CNet News.com reports that SearchKing’s lawsuit against Google has been dismissed. The judge ruled, as expected, that Google’s page rankings are opinions, and that Google has a First Amendment right to state its opinions. Here’s the background: SearchKing sells a service that claims to raise people’s page rankings on the Google search…
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Aimster, Napster, and the Betamax
An interesting amicus brief has been filed in the Aimster case, on behalf of public-interest groups including EFF, PublicKnowledge, and the Home Recording Rights Coalition; library groups including the American Library Association; and industry groups including the Computing and Communications Industry Association and the Consumer Electronics Association. A trial court found Aimster liable for indirect…
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DVDCCA v. Bunner in California Supreme Court
DVDCCA v. Bunner – the “California DVD case” – was argued yesterday in the California Supreme Court. DVDCCA, which is basically the movie industry, sued Andrew Bunner for re-publishing the DeCSS program on his web site. DeCSS, you may recall, is a program for decrypting DVDs. A previous case in Federal court, Universal v. Remeirdes…
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Texas Super-DMCA Apparently Dead
Louis Trager at the Washington Internet Daily reports that the Texas Super-DMCA bill appears to be dead, as this year’s legislative session ended without any action on the bill. There is still a small risk that it will be considered in special session, but the governor’s office says he does not intend to call such…
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Waldo on Standards
Jim Waldo (a Distinguished Engineer at Sun) has written two provocative blog entries about standardization. He argues that technical standards are a good idea when their purpose is to codify existing practice in the industry, but that it’s counterproductive for a standards group to try to invent new technology. I think he’s right. When standards…