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Wednesday, October 22, 2003

The music industry have taken their first direct action against an ISP for copyright infringement in Australia.

The CDT have released a report on their concerns about the broadcast flag and how to make it work. Ernie Miller has already taken them to task over it. Donna, as usual, has lots of interesting links on the subject. One of which is to Cory Doctorow, who is really annoyed at a sloppy piece in Wired News on the subject.

A group of students have launched a campaign against Diebold over their attempts to silence the websites providing links to the companies embarrassing internal memos. This one is going to run and run. Ernest Miller likens the students' approach to a game of whack the mole.

A small Texas company, Bluecurrent, has apparently got a US patent on installing software over the internet. Do I see another Microsoft v Eolas on the horizon?

Finally for this evening, yet another member of Congress demonstrates she just does not get the importance of the end to end architecture of the net in freeing up innovation. Congresswoman Diana DeGette accuses a group of companies she calls "the Microsoft crew" of "seeking to dumb-down the heart of the network in order to strengthen" their own power. Now I'm under no illusions that the Microsofts of this world are primarily interested in their own bottom line, but the Congresswoman's belief that you can facilitate freedom by building control into the "heart of the network" is naive at best. I wonder which of the "broadband providers ... teaming with other companies to offer consumers joint products and services" stem from her own district of Colorado?

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