Dan Gillmor says FCC's Powell must be held to his word Passionate piece about some fo the dangers of media concentration and the potential for a few companies to gain control of the Internet. Sarah Stirland meanwhile has produced a picture of current media ownership in the US.

Q&A with Paul Kocher, who created the SSL security protocol that facilitates buying online, on Putting a Trace on Copyrighted Booty.

The NYT have a nice profile of Richard E. Wiley who was head of the FCC when some of the media ownership regulations were implemented nearly 30 years ago - the most prominent being the prohibition on owning a newpaper and a broadcast station in the same town. Wiley is now in favour of relaxing those rules.

The Foundation for Information Policy Research pointed me at this : "The Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Dispute, Territorial Jurisdiction and Global Governance." Wharton management professor Stephen J. Kobrin reckons the two sides of the pond are divided by differing perspectives on the role of government and the meaning of privacy.

DMCA supporters will have been cheered by the news that a Hawaiian district court says that the DMCA gives copyright holders the right to shut down university or ISP servers without proof that they are infringing on copyrights. Michael J.Rossi dba InternetMovies.com vs. Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) et al.

Alex Macgillivray: of bricoleur was at the DVDCCA v Bunner hearing at the California Supreme court last week about Bunner's alleged violation of trade secrets in 'distributing' the DeCSS DVD decoder software. Some interesting comments. As Edward Felten said "I have never understood why the industry's basic trade secret argument wasn't laughed out of court." How can it be a trade secret anymore when the code has been freely available for so long? They're not even using the DMCA here, even though hard evidence of DeCSS being used in copyright infringement is still not forthcoming as far as I know.