Tag: Technology and Freedom

Cem Kaner has written a Software Customer Bill of Rights. His general approach is to require that customers have roughly the same rights when they buy software as when they buy other products. Much of what Kaner says makes sense. But at least one of his principles seems awfully hard to implement in practice: 2.…

Yesterday the California Supreme Court issued its ruling in DVDCCA v. Bunner, a case pitting trade secrets against freedom of speech. The court ruled that an injunction against disclosure of a trade secret is valid, even though it restricts some speech. The case relates to CSS, the encryption scheme used to scramble the data on…

Last week saw a scary story about a British man who was acquitted of the charge of possessing child pr0n. [Deliberate misspelling to keep dumb censorware tools from blocking this site. But some censorware programs will block this anyway. Heavy Sigh.] The illegal material was on the man’s computer, but he argued that an intruder…

Rep. John Conyers has introduced the Author, Consumer, and Computer Owner Protection and Security (ACCOPS) Act of 2003 in the House of Representatives. The oddest provision of the bill is this one: (a) Whoever knowingly offers enabling software for download over the Internet and does not– (1) clearly and conspicuously warn any person downloading that…

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that Congress can condition Federal funding for libraries on the libraries’ use of censorware (i.e., that a law called CIPA is consistent with the constitution), it’s time to take a serious look at the deficiencies of censorware, and what can be done about them. Suppose you’re a librarian…

Lawrence Solum and Minn Chung have a new paper, “The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law,” in which they argue that layering is an essential part of the Internet’s architecture and that Internet regulation should therefore respect the Internet’s layered nature. It’s a long paper, so no short commentary can do it justice, but…

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…

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…

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…

Orin Kerr has written an.interesting paper, “Cybercrime’s Scope: Interpreting ‘Access’ and ‘Authorization’ in Computer Misuse Statutes,” in which he argues for a new way of understanding the prohibition, in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and other laws, on “access … without authorization” to a computer. It’s a long, dense law review article, but…