A movie executive believes movie piracy deserves as much attention as the war on terrorism. Australian IT reports Star Wars producer, Rick McCallum, as claiming the film making business will be dead in three years if it doesn't deal with Internet piracy.

The latest edition of Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram is a short one because he's working on a new book. Nevertheless, informative as ever.

Ed Felten recently suspended daily entries in his 'Fritz's Hit List' where he lists examples of the kind of things which will need copyright protection built in if the CBDTPA ever becomes law in the US. Just some examples - cockpit voice recorders, talking dog collars, military bugles, digital church bells, speed cameras, musical car horns, buggies to explore the surface of Mars, digital sewing machines, aircraft intercoms, talking pill bottles, Wallace and Gromit talking alarm clock, christmas ornaments, audio greeting cards, toy cash registers and, I kid you not, a remote controlled fart machine.

UNESCO's Information Society Division director, Philippe Quéau, seems to have a similar perspective to Lawrence Lessig. In The World Split in Two. In Search of Ethics and a political Economy for the Information Society he worries about evolving telecoms monopolies and the commercialisation of knowledge. He's particularly concerned about crucial policy questions being "left to extremely narrow circles of specialists, who prepare legislation likely to impact on the entire world, concerning intellectual property rights for example, without any real democratic debate."

The American Library Association are running a conference on the USA PATRIOT Act in December. "SAFEGUARDING OUR PATRONS' PRIVACY: What Every Librarian Needs
to Know About the USA PATRIOT Act & Related Anti-Terrorism Measures." They're intending to cover the Homeland Security bill which has just got passed in the House too.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Copyrights and Copywrongs is due to publish his new book soon. The Anarchist in the Library look at the politics of peer to peer networks.

Lawmeme at Yale report on a case of a Turkish hacker helping the FBI to catch two child abusers. The cases raise interesting legal questions. The judge in one, for example, concluded that the hacker was acting as an agent of law enforcement and was in breach of the 4th amendment, hence his evidence was excluded from the case. The report also points out that the CSEA part of Homeland Security Act doesn't account for hackers who do good.