Via Michael Carroll at Villanova, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) have just published a Handbook on Intellectual Property and Traditional Knowledge

Two democrats are proposing a bill, Author, Consumer, and Computer Owner Protection
and Security (ACCOPS) Act of 2003, that would lead to jail time for file sharers. One of these, Howard Berman, was the guy who previously introduced a bill to provide copyright holders with immunity for damaging other people's computers.

Copyfight has lots of links to pieces on Berman's proposal.
Whilst Berman wants to jail file sharers, the head of Interpol wants a global crackdown on piracy which he links to terrorism.

Hot on the heels of Germany being the fifth EU country to implement the EU copyright directive, the Commission have decided to pursue the other member states for failure to do so yet.

Loyola University Chicago releases two student names to RIAA.

Just got time to point you at the terrific Donna Wentworth's Copyfight and A copyright cold war? The polarized rhetoric of the peer-to-peer debates by John Logie at FirstMonday.
Also, one of my students just pointed me at this amusing cartoon at User Friendly.

Alan Cunningham of the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute, University of London, has started a weblog on issues related to intellectual property, law, technology, philosophy and economics.

The End of End-to-End? By Simson Garfinkel at ECommerce Times:
"Whenever you hear a company bragging about the great services it can offer directly in its
network, understand that it is trying to kill end-to-end. Personally, I'd rather have a dumb
network, a pair of smart endpoints, and a future"

The latest Journal of Information Technology Law has just been published. Refereed articles include:
Trademark Infringement, the Internet and Jurisdiction
by Professor David Bainbridge, Aston Buiness School
Internet File-sharing and the Liability of Intermediaries for Copyright Infringement:A Need for International Consensus by Matthew Just, University of Warwick
Software Development, Intellectual Property, and IT Security
by Robert Gehring, Technical University of
Much Pain for Little Gain? A Critical View of Software Patents
by Christian Koboldt, DotECon Consultants, London
Bearing the Burden: Small Firms and the Patent System
by Stuart Macdonald, Sheffield University
Software Patents and Innovation
by Sylvain Perchaud, President of Europe Shareware:Association Pour la Promotion des Auteurs Européens de Sharewares
There is also a commentary on two of the articles on software patents
The Proposed Software Directive: A User's Comments
by Simon Davies, Patent Attorney, D Young and Company

Musical collaboration across space and time via Creative Commons.

From Larry Lessig's blog, a (warning: large mp3) "wonderful radio show from the Columbia Workshop in 1937 about characters leaving the “copyright lane” for the “public domain.” It is a brilliantly complex and funny tale that reveals an understanding about the value of the public domain that would be hard to recognize today." The show was written by Eustace Wyatt.

A barrister, Jon Holbrook, is not happy with UK government's proposed law on corporate killing. He explains why in Spiked magazine.
"In summary: the government is proposing to create an offence of homicide where criminal guilt
exists in the absence of personal criminal guilt, where the management's errors may not amount to
gross negligence and where the death may not have been the direct result of those errors...
The offence of corporate killing has been devised as a means of securing a conviction for a
person's death where the moral culpability for manslaughter does not exist. The notion of criminal
responsibility is being degraded to such an extent the offence of corporate killing will be criminal in
name only."
Thoughtful piece. Unlikely to make an impact though because the proposed law has such intuitive political and popular appeal. I hasten to add that just because something is intuitively appealing on the surface does not necessarily mean it is correct.

Check out this from an 'urban infiltration' enthusiast at Declan McCullagh's Politech.
"Over the years, it becomes
glaringly obvious to explorers such as ourselves, that almost all of
the critical infrastructure of large cities is _totally_ vulnerable.
Electricity, water, gas, communications, sewage, drainage, rail - all of
them could be shut down over wide areas for days or weeks by simple acts
of vandalism, at remote and unguarded locations...
... we have two observations:
1. It would be easy for anyone wishing to massively disrupt society,
to successfully attack the crucial infrastructure (and escape free.)
2. Suck attacks do not seem to occur...
...The only possible conclusion, is that there is simply no one seriously
interested in committing major infrastructure attacks. And that implies
there are actually no true (or even wannabe) 'terrorists' among us.
And never have been."
I don't accept the conclusion but if s/he is correct about the vunerability of the infrastructure, it is surprising that we have not yet had such an attack.

Some stories of interest from the US press:
Net Radio Group Threatens to Sue RIAA in the Washington Post
How to Make a Sonic Purée From Pop Snippets in the New York Times
and
PATENT BENDING in the New Yorker.
Extract from the latter -
Innovators came up with new ways of selling products, handling
suppliers, running organizations, or managing information. If the ideas were good, the innovators got rich, but they also got
imitated, which made them less rich than they might have been.....
Those were the days. Now the first thing someone with a good notion does is press the government to protect it. Priceline
patented its reverse-auction method for selling cut-rate airline tickets. I.B.M. patented a method for keeping track of people
waiting in line for the bathroom."
This is a bit like getting a patent on the idea of fishing, not a new kind of fishing rod but the idea of fishing itself.

A French court has castigated EMI for inadequate warnings on copy protected CDs, apparently saying they mislead consumers. My schoolboy french is not up to the job of translating the court's opinion but it is available online.

Shawn Fanning is, according to the LA Times, "looking for backers of technology he's developing that would let file-sharing networks distribute music without violating copyrights"

Posting here is likely to slow to a trickle over the summer as I get hit with lots of exam marking and summer school as well as a couple of weeks leave.

Notable: The World Intellectual Property Organisation have received a challenge from a diverse group with interests in the "explosion of open and collaborative projects to create public goods. " Signatories to a letter to the Director General of WIPO, requesting that WIPO "convene a meeting in calendar year 2004 to examine these new open collaborative development models, and to discuss their relevance for public policy" look likely to have that request fulfilled. James Love of the Consumer Project on Technology seems to have organised the letter and co-signatories include James Boyle, Larry Lessig, Yochai Benkler, Diane Cabell, Tim Hubbard, Bruce Perens, Ralph Nadar, Laurie Racine, Richard Stallman, Jonathan Zittrain. Other organisations associated include the Consumers Association in the UK and Medecins sans Frontieres.

Also notable: MIT are launching a "Government Information Awareness" GIA project in response to the US government's TIA programme. Wired News explains.

If you get a chance read The Copyright Cage by Jonathan Zittrain, published in the latest edition of Legal Affairs. Also Orin S. Kerr's "Seeing it Both Ways" in the same edition.

New Scientist is reporting that stem cells have enabled paralysed rats to walk. This brings to mind parallel issues and a speech by the UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, speaking in Edinburg earlier this year. He said "The world's response to the HIV/AIDs pandemic has been murder by indifference... HIV/AIDS is a modern apocalypse. It is a catastrophe that exceeds everthing else in human history in the field of communicable diseases, and it is impossible to understand the depth of the excruciating human toll without keeping in mind that we have never dealt with this kind of human phenomenon before." He went on to make the point that hundreds of billions of dollars have been magically found for the fight against terrorism, yet the West could put a major dent in the fight against AIDS with just $10 billion per year. Koffi Annan has set up the Global Fund to this end but has so far only got pledges to the cummulative effect of about $2billion and only a fraction of those pledges actually donated. Lewis said "We could stop this pandemic in its tracks in a few short years. We know what to do - we simply must find the will to do it."

In the thick of all this internet law and technological developments there is the background not just of the effects of the changes, which most of accept all too passively, but also of the use to which we actively put these developments. I haven't touched on the ethical issues in stem cell research but if we are going to engage in these kinds of developments we surely should be looking at them in the kind of global equitable context that Lewis is so passionate about?

I'm irritated because I just wrote a longish piece about GILC's latest newsletter and lost it in the bowels of Blogger when I tried to post. I'll just point to the newsletter at this point and not repeat my comments.

Jonathan Wallace, in this month's Ethical Spectacle, denounces the Supreme Court's decision upholding CIPA, as a fraud. Jonathan is very well informed about filter software, having run the Censorware Project with Seth Finkelstein, for some years. He makes the point that the fundamental problem with filtering the web is its size and the automated spiders which do most of the assessment are not clever enough to make the required assessments. Also that the few humans involved in assessing sites for software filters are often untrained and subject to unreasonable time contraints and daily quotas, which don't allow them to do the job properly. He goes on:
"Another issue of stunning importance raised by censorware is whether libraries can appropriately delegate their
decision-making processes to twenty year old art students with no training clicking through hundreds of sites a day. Even if
librarians could create their own censorware by reviewing web sites and deciding which to "acquire" for the library, there seems
something inherently suspect in allowing strangers to do it--especially when the strangers refuse to disclose to the libraries the
contents of their blacklists or even the methodologies used to compile them...
Significant portions of my site, such as An Auschwitz Alphabet, and even the pornography essays cited above, are routinely
used as sources by high school and college students writing papers. If you block me on a library computer, you are segregating
me from a significant section of my audience whom I believe would benefit from being able to read my views. If that segregation
has occurred because some artificial stupidity software misapprehended the nature of my site, or a homemaker working
part-time for a censorware company didn't take enough time to understand what my site is about, don't I have reason to
complain? "
That's a fair question IMHO. He reserves his most stinging criticism for Chief Justice Rehnquist, who said in the majority opinion "Assuming that such erroneous blocking presents Constitutional difficulties, any such concerns are dispelled by the ease with which patrons may have the filtering software disabled." I questioned this in the context of the embarrassment factor in an earlier post but Jonathan has another more important point given the current state of the art with software filters:
"The Chief Justice says that the wholesale mischaracterization of innocuous or socially useful sites as porn by a
program that then prevents you from seeing them in a forum in which a large number of Americans secures Internet access,
may not present any kind of free speech problem. That's not food for thought; its poison for thought.

The rest of the sentence is a howler. As the trial court discovered, censorware is not easily turned off in a library. Most
products forward you through a single proxy server. The library does not have the ability to get you out to the Internet through
any other port, and there is no way to switch off the proxy. The best the library can do is contact the censorware company and
request that the particular site the library patron wishes to view be removed from the blacklist. Sometimes the censorware
companies don't respond to such requests; when they do, it can take weeks, rendering the unblocking futile, as the patron has
probably forgotten, lost interest, or turned in her research paper by now. Finally, there have been instances of censorware
companies manually unblocking a site several times, only to have it re-added to the blacklist by the spider...
Since censorware itself is a fiction--a startling case of doing something inaccurate, poorly planned, buggy, in order to create the
fiction of doing something-- it is not surprising that the Chief Justice tacked on an additional fiction, that the censorware can be
turned off when a user requests. If we can pretend that censorware works, we might as well also pretend that it can be shut off." Food (or 'poison' as Jonathan might content) for thought.

Ex French prime minister and now MEP, Michel Rocard, is, according to Libération, leading the opposition to software patents. This is despite being in the same political group in the parliament as Arlene McCarthy, who is leading the drive for software patents. Rocard says "A civilization should be preserved where the place of the world outside the market and of the human intellect is respected... any software which describes or facilitates the circulation of the products of the mind [les produits de l'esprit] (nb text processing, for example) should not be patentable." Extract from the article:
"One does not find a computer on the Parisian desk of Michel Rocard. He
admits it freely: he is not "one of the generation which has an easy
facility with the computer". However, as president of the Committee for
Culture in the European Parliament, he has had to plunge himself, with
an "evil madness", into software patentability, "words which even a year
ago were unknown to me". Today, if he speaks about it in such an
animated way, it is because hiding behind the technical aspects there is
a real issue about civilization. For the ex prime minister, the
introduction of patents on software in Europe would be "very serious".
It would call into question the freedom of movement of human knowledge. "
As someone who is not "one of the generation which has an easy facility with the computer" he's showing a grasp of the issues here.

Check out Derek Slater on Judge Richard Posner's decision in the Madster and Aimster case. Yesterday, the judge ruled against the file sharing services as expected.

In another long running Internet law dispute, the California supreme court ruled yesterday in favour of a former Intel employee, Kourosh Kenneth Hamidi. The company had complained that Hamidi had interfered with employee productivity by sending mass emails on six separate occasions over two years to up to 35000 Intel employees, criticising the company's employment practices. He did not breach any security systems and offered to and did remove anyone from his list who did not wish to recieve his emails any further. There was no argument that the conduct had deprived Intel of the use of their computer system. Intel alleged that Hamidi committed the tort of tresspass to chattels and the court at first instance and the court of appeal had ruled in their favour. The California Supreme court, however, on a split 5-4 decision said that "Such an electronic communication does not constitute an actionable trespass to personal property, i.e. the computer system, because it does not interfere with the possessor's use of or possession of, or other legally protected interest in, the personal property itself." They also said "Our conclusion does not rest on any special immunity for communications by electronic mail; we do not hold that messages transmitted through the Internet are exempt from the ordinary rules of tort liablity." And thye distinguished the case from others where spammers had been held liable but where the volume mail had been so high as to interfere with the operation of the system which constituted the personal property. "...under California law, the tort does not encompass, and should not be extended to encompass, an electronic communication that neither damages the recipient computer system nor impairs its functioning." I recall the case originally raising cyber-libertarians because it was claimed that Mr Hamidi's right to free speech was being impaired. It's an interesting decision.

Donna Wenthworth is blogging ILAW at Stanford and Larry Lessig has just done his synopsis of his first book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace -
1. Cyberspace can be regulated, contrary to libertarian opinion.
2. Four things constrain behaviour - law, norms, market forces and architecture
3. These four regulators interact with each other, so e.g. law can influence norms
4. Architecture, once set, regulates without further human input
5. Original Net architecture facilitated anonymity. Elements grafted on to the architecture undermined that facility e.g. cookies "Puts a tag on your computer. A clever, tiny change with dramatic consequences." Another example is IP mapping which makes users "relatively identifiable"
6. So small changes can hugely change the effect of the architecture.
He also refers to the HP - MIT fight over spam blacklisting which I had fogotten -
Battle between HP and MIT. HP subscribed to ORBS. MIT mail was blocked; MIT didn’t implement policies ORBS thought appropriate. MIT got mad. They started blocking all mail from HP. Arms race. This was only stopped because ORBS went down.

Summarising, he says:
"Code is law" is not my idea; it’s Mitch Kapor’s. He
said: "Architecture is politics." Second point: code is
plastic. Third point: sometimes no law can beget bad
code. Fourth point, more tentative: good law can be used
to avoid bad code (maybe)?

Some insight on the Microsoft XBox mod chip story in Australia. Nathan Cochrane is not too impressed with the Microsoft PR person. He believes "Microsoft was denied the right of an adequate reply" to the story because the PR person he and the ZDNet reporter, Patrick Gray, contacted did not do her job properly.

Today Nathan is reporting on a proposed new service P2P for expatriate TV watchers. A "French company is ready to launch a device that lets television viewers watch any channel on earth, and may open another front in the battle over digital copyright."

And Declan McCullagh elsewhere is complaining about Microsoft's lobbying efforts to induce regulation to keep the Net neutral. Declan is a pure libertarian who is suspicious of government regulation and believes market forces will right all wrongs for consumers. I admire his convictions but given that market forces are ultimately underpinned by contract law - ie. government regulation - I have never been totally convinced. The world is a bit more complex than pure libertarianism would have us believe. Nevertheless Declan is irritated that Microsoft, of all companies, should be changing tack on their coincident beliefs - Microsoft also, until recently, viewed with suspicion government interference in the marketplace. His second complaint about Microsoft in the article is they are taking a position in their lobbying that they have so far refused to espouse or defend in public.

Tim O'Reilly points to a 'Great Rant on Intellectual Property', otherwise known as Illegal Art.

In the DEMOS report, Mobilisation, James Harkin concludes that the killer app of the next generation mobile phones will be "location awareness" i.e. the ability to pinpoint the user's location accurately at any time. Will people really come to love being tracked precisely and minutely? The DEMOS report is available at their website.

Kieran McCarthy has some advice for opponents of software patents in Europe, on persuading politicians of the merits of their case - appeal to their egos. HE suggests there are three things to avoid
1. Ideological arguments - because politicians move with the prevailing winds
2. Little people defence - politicians don't like picking fights with the powerful, as it can damage their careers
3. Criticism - politicians don't like to be told they are stupid and just don't get it. (No more than anyone else!) Better to ride the ego, wine and dine, tell them how clever they are and then explain your perspective in easy to manage chunks or soundbites. They understand, for example, the argument that 'patents encourage innovation and investment and that harmonising laws make things simpler everywhere'. They don't get the argument that 'patents (ans software patents in particular) can restrict innovation in some circumstances because...[add here any one of umpteen complex justifications for the anti software patent stance] ....' If you cannot make your point in 3 or 4 seconds you just will not get through.

From the Berkman Center we learn that "James Boyle, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School, has won this year's World Technology Award in Law" James' book Shamans Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society is one of the most enlightening works on intellectual property and information economics I've ever read and this award is thoroughly deserved. The elite list of nominees he was up against gives you an indication of how important his work is:
Prof. Martin Adelman - George Washington University Law School
Mr. Hisamitsu Arai - Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters,Cabinet Secretariat
Prof. Yochai Benkler - New York University School of Law
Prof. Robert Bohrer - California Western School of Law
Prof. James Boyle - Duke Law School
Mr. Stuart Brotman - Stuart N. Brotman Communications
Prof. Paul Goldstein - Stanford Law School
Dr. Thomas Hoeren - University of Muenster
Dr. Kamil Idris - World Intellectual Property Organization
Mr. Michael Kirk - American Intellectual Property Law Association
Prof. Edmund Kitch - University of Virginia
Prof. Lawrence Lessig - Stanford University
Judge Richard Linn - U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
Prof. Daniel Poulin, Mr. Ernst Perpignand and Mr. Marc-Andre Morissette - LexUM, Faculty of Law, University of Montreal
Prof. Pamela Samuelson - UC Berkeley
Dr. Barbara Simons - Association for Computing Machinery

A fair few things of note around but I'm limited for time today, so check out the usual suspects like Donna Wenthworth but one thing I would like to point you to is David Post's short note at the Volokh Conspiracy -
"Copyright Battles, Con't: Public Library of Science, a group of scientists and physicians seeking to insure that scientific information is placed in the public domain, free of copyright or other intellectual property protection, has launched a campaign to strip copyright protection entirely from works prepared with the "substantial" financial support of the US government.....
It's an important effort, I think (full disclosure: I've been a kind of informal advisor to the PLoS people for a while now), worth keeping an eye on. The recording industry's battles over Internet "piracy" have received most of the buzz in this area, but in many ways this clash between scientists and scientific publishers is equally important for the future of copyright law. " I have a quibble - I'd have said it's more important for scientific information to be in the public domain but I guess that's the techie in me.

A company that makes mod chips for the Microsoft XBox has released the design of the chips under an open source license in Australia. Microsoft and rival Sony will not like that. Sony, in January 2002, successfully shut down, through legal action, a [messiah] mod chip [for Sony's Playstation] importer to the UK but failed in a similar action in Australia, in July 2002.

George Radwanski, Canada's Privacy Commissioner, resigned yesterday after his recent troubles. It's a long and robust resignation letter and he's sticking strongly to the line that he is the victim of nasty politics, perpetrated by folk in power, who didn't appreciate his effectiveness in his job.
"I hope that all fair-minded Canadians will judge me by what I have accomplished on their behalf and
by the unwavering vigour, commitment and spirit of service with which I have carried out my duties,
and not by the vicious, untrue and distorted things that have recently been said and reported about
me. I have paid a heavy price in these past days for doing my job of overseeing and defending the
privacy rights of all Canadians as I believe they deserve to have it done, but I leave proudly and
with no regrets except for being unable to carry on this vital work."
The Canadian media have a rather more negative perspective on the resignation.

SCOTUS blog on US V ALA on the Supreme Court decision upholding CIPA enforcement of library filters. They also provide a brief accessible summary of the positions of the various justices.
Jenny Levine's got a collection of links on the case. You can tell she's not overly enamoured with the decision,
"This decision only points out even further how out of touch
our politicians and judges are with the daily lives of the
people they are supposed to represent. Obviously none of
them use the public libraries they just deemed themselves
knowledgeable enough to censor.

Final thought for the night: someone please correct me if
I'm wrong, but there's no additional funding for libraries to
start purchasing site licenses for filtering software, using staff
time and resources to create internal solutions, or
outsourcing the job of building something. So now we're
supposed to divert existing monies (that help pay for the
access itself?) from our already weakened budgets in order
to be compliant with this decision? I'm still looking for the
common sense logic here...."
I suspect one of the Chief Justice's arguments, which he will be most criticised for, by opponents of the decision will be: "A library’s failure to make quality-based judgments about all the materials it furnishes from the Web does not somehow taint the judgments it does make. A library’s need to exercise judgment in making collection decisions depends on its traditional role in identifying suitable and worthwhile material; it is no less entitled to play that roll when it collects material from the internet than when it collects material from any other source. Most libraries already exclude pornography from their print collections because they deem it inappropriate for inclusion. We do not subject these decisions to heightened scrutiny; it would make little sense to treat libraries’ judgments to block online pornography any differently, when they judgments are made for just the same reason.” He's not actually treating like with like here and is pre-supposing that the libraries define what gets filtered out. Whereas it is the software filter companies who decide what criteria are used for filtering. Justice Souter, who disagreed with the majority (6-3) opinion, argues that excluding porn from an existing set of resources is different from actively spending money on porn to include in those resources. For a self described luddite, that's a pretty good demonstration that he understands the difference between the 'push' nature of most conventional media versus the 'pull' nature of the Net. Chief Justice Rehnquist, in the paragraph quoted, doesn't display a direct awareness of the push v pull distinction. It's unfair to take the paragraph out of context and I have not yet read the entire 56 page ruling but that one jumped out at me a bit.
One of the concurring justices (can't remember which at the moment) seems to be primarily swayed by the argument that there is no big deal here. If library patrons want unfiltered access to the Net via a library computer, they can just ask the librarian to switch the filter off. The possibilty of such an outlet then brings the question of anonymity into play. I might find it no big deal to ask a librarian to switch a filter off because, for example, it happens to block access to a site like the Ethical Spectacle, maintained by a prominent critic of software filters, Jonathan Wallace. (The websites of people like Jonathan and Seth Finkelsteinhave been blacklisted by some filter software companies.) Others might not be prepared to ask a librarian to switch off a filter for fear of being perceived in a negative light as someone interested in pornography. In his dissent, Justice Souter, on this point said "First, the statute says only that a library 'may' unblock, not that it must...In addition, it allows unblocking only for a 'bona fide research or other lawful purposes'. There is therefore necessarily some restriction, which is surely made more onerous by the uncertainty of its terms and the generosity of its discretion to library staffs in deciding who gets complete Internet access and who does not." Absolutely.

Following the deliberations of JURI on software patents, the European Parliament are scheduled to vote on the matter on 30 June, according to this contribution to Slashdot. For those of you who may be concerned enough about this to consider contacting your Member of the European Parliament about this, the UK OFFICE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT have provided a convenient map to allow you to identify your representatives.

Breaking news - the Supreme Court has just posted it's judgement in the CIPA library filtering case, US v ALA. Looks as though they've ruled the Act constitutional. No doubt the legal scholars will be all over this one very soon.

Phillip Greenspun in the Harvard blogosphere is concerned at the privatisation of previously public owned resources. His theory is that in spite of an economic downturn, the stock prices of companies absorbing these commons is going up because of this absorption. It would be really interesting to see some hard evidence of such a direct link, if there is some out there. Larry Lessig has offered some relevant background to the part of the story about Disney flyovers.

Update: Given that the Supreme Court has now ruled CIPA is ok on first amendment grounds, it's interesting to note that Reporters Without Borders have just published their second report on the state of global Net censorship. Vint Cerf has written the foreword. In it he says:
Truth is a powerful solvent. Stone walls melt before its
relentless might. The Internet is one of the most powerful
agents of freedom. It exposes truth to those who wish to see
and hear it. It is no wonder that some governments and
organizations fear the Internet and its ability to make the truth
known. The phrase "freedom of speech" is often used to
characterize a key element of democratic societies : open
communication and especially open government. But freedom
of speech is less than half of the equation. It is also vital that
citizens have the freedom to hear and see. It is the latter area in
which many governments have intervened in an attempt to
prevent citizens from gaining access to information that their
governments wish to withhold from them.

Ian Lance Taylor visited SCO to find out about their case against IBM and linux. There was no direct access to legal documents and SCO are still keeping the detailed evidence and claims under wraps but there is more detail here than in previous media reports. Taylor did have to sign a draconian non disclosure agreement but was shown a piece of code that SCO claimed infringed their rights. Taylor wasn't convinced by the example and wasn't able to provide a copy because of the NDA but his perspective was that that it was possible that some code may have been copied from unix into linux but that there were numerous examples of the same code to be found easily around the net and that SCO were stretching the definition of what constituted a derivative work. Nice to see a few scraps emerging on this saga but the explicit evidence and court documents remain elusive and beyond the scope of open scrutiny for the moment.

The Special Olympics World Summer Games 2003 opened in Dublin on Saturday evening. Can somebody tell me why the british media have ignored it? As the official site says "This is the first time in the 35-year history of Special Olympics that a World Games Opening Ceremony has been held outside of the United States of America." It's on the UK's doorstep and yet the media here are more interested in a guy with a false beard and a dress sneaking into a 21st birthday party.

John McCain, Senate Commerce Committee chairman, will hold a hearing on the fallout from Verizon having to hand over customer details to the RIAA.

Meanwhile Eric Raymond is weighing into the SCO UNIX trade secret claims lawsuit with IBM. According to the story at PC World,
"Raymond claims to have collected the names of 60 Unix users who are willing to sign affidavits that disprove SCO's contention that its Unix System V source code, which forms the basis of IBM's AIX Unix, contains trade secrets."

Seán McGrath explains why we can Blame/thank the Irish for copyright law. Mark O'Neill picked up the story the same day and expanded on it. A couple of saints engaging in a fierce battle over a supreme court ruling that said "To every cow its calf, to every book, its copy" (or to be more precise "Le gach bain a bainin, le gach leabhar a leabhrán."), resulting in 3000 mortalities and we talk about the 'copyright wars' today!

Back briefly to point to a piece in the Washington Post - Harry Potter and the Copyright Lawyer.

Paul Carlyle, a partner at commercial law firm Shepherd & Wedderburn specialising in intellectual property and telecommunications law, writes in the Scotsman: "The European Commission consultation on patenting software, published last year, revealed most to be against any extension of patents to business methods. Even the draft Software Patent Directive, currently being finalised, seeks simply to codify the current position rather than extend patent protection."

Paul Meller over at InfoWorld likewise seems to think that Arlene McCarthy and her JURI committee have settled "on a position that ignores views from both extremes of the debate over software patents, and endorses the approach to patentability currently applied by the European Patent Office." He also says, "The European Parliament is likely to support a law that permits software patents but limits their application to inventions that have a technical effect outside of just a computer program. A program could only be patented if it runs in conjunction with some sort of device such as an intelligent household appliance or a mobile phone." That's one interpretation of the language but the concern of opponents of the measure is that it does not read exactly like that.

It seems that the intention of folk like MEP McCarthy is that the "technical effect" (or "technical solution" as it appears to have been called in JURI) doctrine apply to software patents, whereby the software can only be patented if in combination with a computer or other piece of hardware it can be considered to be a novel, useful and non-obvious invention. So the software can't be patented in isolation. The concern of McCarthy's opponents is that the technical effect notion is vague and in the case of software, if you can run it on a computer, it will have a technical effect. So any software that runs is thereby patentable. Speaking of running, I've got to and this saga is likely to.

Another note to T182 students: remember from Section 1 -

"The Future of Ideas applies the environmental movement's sustainability rallying call to the resources we use to create and innovate. Its author, Lawrence Lessig, presents the case for the sustainability of ideas. He argues that unless we nurture the resources used to create and innovate scientific discoveries, language, skills, stories, facts etc. then society will run out of ideas. Lessig thinks we are fencing off these resources with law and technology, handing control of them to private owners. "

Here is an articulate rant, by Evan Hunt linking the environment and the public domain. In a similar vein to Lessig, Evans says:
"Why was Eldred vs. Ashcroft such a horrible blow? Because our generation and those that came before us were lucky enough to have a rich public domain to draw from in creating new artistic work, and our descendents will be stuck with no more than what we had--after we've already thoroughly mined it--and anything else, they'll have to pay for. Disgusting.Protecting the public domain is another kind of environmentalism."

The final chapter in Larry Lessig's The Future of Ideas is called What Orrin Understands and praises Senator Orrin Harch for his stance on the Napster and Microsoft cases, and specifically his concerns about concentrations of power. Senator Hatch, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is apparently now keen to give the music industry the right to remotely destroy peer to peer file sharer's computers.
"If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," Hatch said. "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize....There's no excuse for anyone violating copyright laws." I guess Professor Lessig and Senator Hatch have reached a parting of the ways....

I've been falling behind with things and hadn't spotted, over at SecurityFocus, Scott Granneman's look at DRM in general and Microsoft's plans in the area.

I'm not sure where Donna Wenthworth gets her energy from and manages to keep up with so many developments, but Copyfight is a must read (as usual) on everything from PIL 2003 to the fascinating "The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law"by Lawrence Solum and Minn Chung to Seth Finkelstein on the DMCA, fair use and Eldred. But don't waste time here - head over to the original for the complete works.

Note to my T182 students - You may find the Information Commons Blog on libraries as commons helpful in respect of the early discussion we had in Section 2 re. commons.

The June 13, 2003 entry in full follows

"Libraries and the Defense of the Commons

There's been a bit more blog discussion linking the defense of libraries and the defense of the commons. Larry Lessig picked up
on our post yesterday about funding cuts in Milwaukee-area school libraries. Larry suggests that librarians might sign the
Reclaim the Public Domain petition and ultimately lower the cost of libraries by expanding the public domain.

The sound you may have heard just now was the palm of my hand smacking against my forehead. Yes! Thank you, Larry. I
should have made the connection between the petition and supporting libraries myself, but now will not fail to take up the
banner Larry has so graciously unfurled. However, I think there are stronger reasons for librarians to support the petition than
just lowering the cost of information and therefore possibly making library budgets go further (laudable though that practical
goal may be).

Libraries are some of the best examples we have of the information commons in action. Libraries are community resources that
provide all kinds of information services to the public. Librarians are professionals whose role is to make the information
commons accessible to users. Librarians are among the staunchest supporters of access to information and of the framework of
rights necessary to guarantee that access. And librarians should support the public domain in general (and this petition in
particular) because the access to information embodied in copyright's public domain is interwoven with access to information in
society as a whole. An action in support of a vibrant public domain is an action that supports access to information overall.

And the discussion goes on. Over at Copyfight, Donna Wentworth linked Larry's post back to the Shifted Librarian. And that's
where Jenny Levine at TSL added: "The public domain and commons is just one more excellent service that libraries enrich,
and yet one more service we as a society will lose, if we don't start valuing our libraries and librarians more." Support the
commons, support libraries. Support libraries, support the commons.

Jessamyn from librarian.net added to the discussion with a comment on yesterday's commons-blog posting citing TSL. I'm
copying it here in its entirety to make it a bit more prominent:

"strikes me also that we need to be less vague than "support library services" in our requests. I think we need to:

"1. stress why libraries are important;

"2. explain specifically what we would like politicians to do [not just wear an "I [heart] my library" button in public];

"3. make having a library card wrapped up with being a good citizen.

"These things have been working well, so far, in Vermont where we have bi-partisan support FOR libraries and AGAINST the
USA PATRIOT Act. Go see Bernie Sanders at ALA and tell him you like what he is doing.

"...and, of course, going to our public library ourselves, and encouraging others to do the same. Even if you like to buy books at
Amazon, there are still things your library has to offer you. And every little book checked out helps your library look more
vital."

There are a couple of things I really appreciate about Jessamyn's comment. For one thing, I believe it implicitly suggests that
supporting libraries (like supporting the commons) is inherently a political act (at least in terms of requiring that we take a clear
position on how resources are organized in our society). Furthermore, she points out that we need to be very concrete about
what we think libraries offer, about what we want to acheive, and about what we ask our elected officials to do for us. If we
can't get concrete, it will be much more difficult to get anywhere.

Another point this conversation is raising for me is that we have greater potential for success if we can work together. There are
lots of ways that people are working to promote access to ideas and it can only help us to see the connections among the
various initiatives and to approach them with a spirit of mutual cooperation. Support for the public domain ultimately *is*
support for libraries, and the reverse is true as well. Furthermore, all of us who advocate openness in information can take heart
in the successes of our compatriots. The groundswell of opposition to the FCC's further deregulation of media ownership rules
is good news for all of us concerned with promoting access to ideas. The 12-thousand plus signatures on the Petition to
Reclaim the Public Domain are a sign of support not just for the Eldred Act, but for access to information overall.

So what to do? How about building a coalition that brings together the many voices working now to promote the commons and
access to information in its many forms? Is this desirable? Is it possible? And to what extent is it already happening? More on
this from me in the future, but if anyone has thoughts on this, I hope you'll share. . ."

There are some responses to these thoughts also available.

Back to George Radwanski - He allegedly spent $500,000 on travel and hospitality over two years. Can't say I've ever spent as much as $444.49 on dinner for two. Looks like he also has the authority to sign off on his own expenses claims. There's certainly a lot of mud flying around here and looks likely there'll be more.

The Green party have produced a negative press release on McCarthy's success on software patents. A bit ott - comes across as hysteria and doesn't really help make the point.

There's been a lot of activity on EU software patents in recent days. Labour MEP Arlene McCarthy has convinced the European Parliament's Commission on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market (JURI) to go along with her proposals on software patents. Apparently McCarthy won a majority on all points, which one critic says means
- introduction of program claims
- refusal of interoperability privilege (ITRE 15)
- refusal of definition of "technical"
- what is new needn't be technical and what is technical needn't be new
- no need for a technical solution, only problem must be technical
- additional rationales for patentability (e.g. need to make money
from licensing in view of low-cost economies)

NIce article on Balancing Data Needs And Privacy - how US folk can preserve privacy in response to the Total Information Awareness programme. It appears there has been some substantial investment by the Pentagon into research at PARC to produce sound privacy enhancing technologies, that strip away personally identifying information, whilst allowing aggregate analysis of data in sophisticated ways which further the objectives of law enforcement and security services to fight crime and protect against other attacks. DARPA have put up £3.5 million dollars for this research, which is a bit more than peanuts. Marc Rottenberg of EPIC is skeptical "You can't escape the fundamental contradiction of privacy research being conducted around a half-a-billion-dollar program of national surveillance. It is like building environmentally friendly nuclear power plants."

The cynic in me agrees with him. The reality is that mass privacy invasion is unlikely to be counteracted in the short term effectively by law, however. So what we probably need is an architectural/technological response/development of the type that Teresa Lunt appears to be considering here. Private enterprises and individuals then can use these kinds of technolgies as technological gatekeepers to maintain the integrity of access, with various levels of access being granted e.g to law enforcement authorities who provide appropriately secured warrants or other legal documents.

George Radwanski looks to be on his way out, though he says he will not go quietly. The committee does seem to be making a big issue of two things - anomalies in expenses (they seem to think he's been stretching his travel budget unreasonably) and an altered paragraph in a letter about access to information. The latter, the Commissioner says, was an admin error - seems like a reasonable explanation but if you've got folk who are suspicious of you investigating you, it's not wise to provide that kind of ammunition. Mr Radwanski's suggestion is that the government don't like him because he is doing his job too well. Maybe the best form of defense is attack. I've been impressed in the past by Radwanski's committment to sound privacy principles but there isn't enough detailed information in the public domain about this investigation to make a judgement as to whether he has a real case to answer or whether it is a case of machiavelian manoeuverings on the part of political opponents that we are seeing here. It would be a pity to see a principled advocate of privacy protection brought down by silly mistakes or nasty politics. IF there are serious questions to be answered, from my limited knowledge of the man, I always figured him for the kind of guy who would fall on his sword. I await developments with interest.

The Canadian parliamentary committee investigating the Privacy Commissioner, George Radwanski, are anonymously leaking it to the press that they have "lost confidence" in him and apparently preparing the ground for a recommendation that he be sacked.

Ernie the Attorney and Jenny Levine (aka the shifted librarian) are concerned about cuts in library funding and the affect it is going to have on our collective ability to be able to search for information. They've got a point. How many folk, for example, when using Google, use any of the tricks Simson Garfinkel points out to allow us to make our searching more effective?

The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure are getting agitated about developments in Europe on software patents. The Eurolinux Alliance have an online petition "to warn European Authorities against the dangers of software patents." Meanwhile, the proponents of software patents like Labour MEP, Arlene McCarthy, are merrily winning the PR battle by painting the opposition as extremists. As Doc Searls said, Hollywood won the Eldred case
"because they have successfully repositioned copyright as a property issue.
In other words, they successfully urged the world to understand copyright in terms of property. Copyright = property may
not be accurate in a strict legal sense, but it still makes common sense, even to the Supreme Court. Here's how Richard
Bennett puts it:

The issue here isn't enumeration, or the ability of Congress to pass laws of national scope regarding
copyright; the copyright power is clearly enumerated in the Constitution. The issue, at least for the
conservative justices who sided with the majority is more likely the protection of property rights. In order
to argue against that, Lessig would have had to argue for a communal property right that was put at odds
with the individual property right of the copyright holder, and even that would be thin skating at best. So
the Supremes did the only possible thing with respect to property rights and the clearly enumerated power
the Constitution gives Congress to protect copyright.
Watch the language. While the one side talks about licenses with verbs like copy, distribute, play, share and perform, the
other side talks about rights with verbs like own, protect, safeguard, protect, secure, authorize, buy, sell, infringe, pirate,
infringe, and steal.

This isn't just a battle of words. It's a battle of understandings. And understandings are framed by conceptual metaphors. We
use them all the time without being the least bit aware of it. We talk about time in terms of money (save, waste, spend, gain,
lose) and life in terms of travel (arrive, depart, speed up, slow down, get stuck), without realizing that we're speaking about
one thing in terms of something quite different. As the cognitive linguists will tell you, this is not a bad thing. In fact, it's very
much the way our minds work.

But if we want to change minds, we need to pay attention to exactly these kinds of details."

Doc also points to George Lakoff's wonderful essay Metaphor, Morality, and Politics Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust, on a similar theme.

Since the DVDCCA v Bunner DeCSS trade secrets case from California recently reached the Supreme Court, I was reminded of a sharp sartire on osOpinion some time ago.

Larry Lessig and Matt Oppenheim (of the Recording Industry Association of America) debated the Copyright Conundrum at PBS. Wide ranging interesting debate in reponse to a series of provocative questions. Donna Wenthworth points to one of her favorite Lessig quotes from the debate, "The RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America. It is not the Recording Industry and Artists Association of America. It says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle." Ouch.

AOL's changes to spam filters are affecting more than the Well, apparently.

In the UK, the Independent reports that Employers who snoop on e-mails risk penalty, as the Information Commissioner finally publishes his code of practice on monitoring employees at work.

The very active Canadian Privacy Commissioner, George Radwanski, is possibly facing disciplinary charges, according to some press reports. Radwanski has upset a few politicians in his time as Commissioner, so it's not surprising, in a way, that he will be subject to such scrutiny and political maneouvering. The timing is interesting, as he has just had his suit over police camera surveillance in British Columbia dismissed by the province's supreme court. He has also just upheld a customer complaint against an airline that denied that customer
"access to its Web site because his browser was
configured to disable “cookies”; and (2) that the company collects the
personal information of its Web site visitors without their knowledge
and consent by placing a cookie on their computers’ hard drives."

Alan Gathright at The San Francisco Chronicle seems to think that the No-fly list ensnares innocent travelers because the government and the airlines are using old software to do the sifting. What if they used newer software?

Nice commentary on the systemic hypocracy visited upon society by the image merchants of our times and the pressure we implicitly as a society place on these characters to pretend to be better than they are.

Is AOL blocking email from The Well? This is the kind of thing that Larry Lessig worries about.

Joi Ito has published A Report of Research on Privacy for Electronic Government He got funded by the Japanese government "to produce a global report on privacy technology and legislation."
From the Creative Commons weblog, Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, is recommending Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which is available under a creative commons license.
The European Union is on the official US Trade Representative 2003 Intellectual Property Special Report Priority Watch List. The complaint in full on the website states:
At the conclusion of the 1999 Special 301 review, the United States initiated a
"WTO dispute settlement case against the EU, based on the apparent TRIPS
deficiencies in EU Regulation 2081/92, which governs the protection of geographical
indications (GIs) for agricultural products and foodstuffs in the EU. The regulation
appears to deny national treatment to foreign GIs. According to the plain language
of the regulation, only EU GIs may be registered. With respect to trademarks, the
regulation permits dilution and even cancellation of trademarks when a GI is created
later in time. Our initial WTO consultation request alleged that this regulation
denies national treatment to foreign geographical indications, and does not provide
sufficient protection to trademarks that are similar or identical to a GI and is,
therefore, in violation of the TRIPS Agreement. The United States requested
consultations regarding this matter on June 1, 1999, and numerous consultations
have been held since then. However, to date, we have not reached a mutually
agreeable solution. While the EU has recently issued some amendments to its
regulation, these amendments do not address our principal concerns with respect
to full national treatment and appropriate protection for trademarks. Finally, lack of
full implementation of the EU Biotech Directive by EU member states is also of
concern."
The brittle EU - US relationship over agriculture even spills over into trademarks.

Larry Lessig, James Boyle and co. have produced a model letter for US citizens to send to their Congressional representatives, encouraging them to support the Eric Eldred Act.

Mary Hodder at the Berkeley IP weblog points us at Wilful Infringement an ad for a DVD movie "that Disney does NOT want you to watch!" It appears to be a poke at the overbroad nature of copyright laws and the influence large copyright holding companies have in the arena. Lawrence Lessig & Mickey Mouse, amongst others are in it.

Edward Felten doesn't think the SCO claims over Linux are really about problems with open source at all. So maybe my suggestions that Bill and Steve would be please about the spat are overreaching? Ed has a point but I doublt it will stop the case being wielded in the PR battles to come.

Eugene Volokh's original concerns, about Larry Lessig's petition to levy a $1 fee to retain copyright beyond 50 years, have been somewhat tempered by some research he has done. He is still not convinced about the idea but considers it worth discussing. His original concern: "I think that the forfeiture for nonpayment of the registration fee may constitute a taking of property, and may thus put the federal government on the hook for compensation, at least in some cases." Now he's found a 1982 Supreme Court case Texaco, Inc. v. Pond, which said that the government may require property owners to periodically register theri claims without having to compensate them. He is "still not completely sure that such a registration requirement would be entirely fair to the copyright owner" but accepts there are indeed good policy arguments for clearing away those property interests that aren't really being exploited by the owner, and are just interfering with the potentially valuable behavior of others." I don't always agree with Prof. Volokh but he certainly brings an interesting perspective to bear on complex issues.

Apparently the latest version of ReplayTV's digital video recorder has cut out previous version features such as the ability to share shows and skip ads. Digital Networks North America who acquired the brand from the sued-into-oblivion SonicBlue don't want to get into similar hot water with the entertainment industry. The movie industry are pleased suggesting it is "a step in the right direction." The EFF are less so, ``There's a pretty clear message being sent that Hollywood can dictate what technologies consumers can and cannot use. What we are concerned about is there's little room for technological innovation.''

There have apparently been further developments in the SCO v linux battle. eWeek says "SCO Group may have violated the
terms of the GNU GPL (General Public License) by incorporating source code from the Linux kernel into the Linux Kernel Personality feature found in SCO Unix without giving the changes back to the community or displaying copyright notices attributing the code to Linux." More ammunition for Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.

Inventor Thomas Woolston's courtroom win in his business process patent lawsuit against eBay has not gone down too well with some. The patent concerns buying something at a fixed price over the internet. The victor is not happy with his critics claims that he should never have got a patent on such an obvious application of an idea: ``It's the combination of elements that defines the invention. There are 42 patents on the Post-It note. It's the combination of a not-so-good glue and a pad of paper,'' Woolston said. Whadaya know - 42 patents on the Post-It. I knew there were a lot but didn't realise it might be that high.

A bit of fun at Michael Powell's expense over the FCC decision to relax media concentration rules can be had at SFGate. Mark Fiore has also done some satirical animations on other aspects of the information age such as the TIA.

CNet News have an interview with Larry Lessig about the petition to reclaim the public domain. I referred to this effort recently to convince Congress to introduce a law to get copyright holders to pay $1 fifty years after a work is published in order to get the copyright extended. If the $1 is not paid the work passes into the public domain.

FIPR point to Cryptome on Friday last -

"One problem that most naive paranoid types completely fail to grasp is the titanic volume of modern communications. The flow
is so overwhelming that only a powerful God could possibly process it all to find interesting material. The entire federal budget
could not pay enough humans to screen and analyze ALL the electonic communications of even a medium size city in 2003.
So communications intercepts are necessarily targeted very narrowly, even drag net fishing is likely done only in places where
there is a real likelihood that something important will turn up with finite effort.

The notion that an all powerful big brother is listening to everything and capturing everything just is not realistic, and a very very
high percentage of what does get captured is never looked at or listened to or even stored for very long."

Only the practioners really ever understand the limitations of the technology - drinking from the firehose being one of the most obvious....

A Republican Senator is introducing a bill to regulate DRM technologies - the idea is to force content owners "to prominently disclose to consumers the presence of anticopying technology in their products" and protect the right of consumers to resell copy protected CDs or DVDs.

Are the P2P file sharing networks about to start suing each other? Stefanie Olsen, John Borland and Evan Hansen seem to think so as they report that Alnet is claiming rival networks may have infringed a patent it holds on digital tags. Altnet has licensed the 'TrueNames' patent to Sharman Networks, owners of Kazaa. The Altnet ceo says "We're very focused on preserving the integrity of the patent and realizing the potential it offers peer-to-peer applications and content owners." Sounds to me like an invitation to the IP lawyers to make hay while the sun shines.

Having been buried in other things I missed the fact that Verizon had agreed to reveal the until now anonymous p2p file sharers to the RIAA. The EFF are not happy.

Meanwhile the Register is questioning the veracity of the WSJ story I posted a link to earlier in the day, regarding the alledged crackdown on P2P users in Italy.

Anita Ramasastry writes an article called : Third Party Data Monitoring and Collection on the Internet: Is it Illegal Wiretapping? on the excellent Findlaw website. Interesting look at the Pharmatrack case where the US Court of Appeals for the 1st circuit suggested such data collection might breach the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA). It would be quite funny if a law that old jumped up to bite the personal data trawlers and direct marketers of this world. I wonder if it was considered in the Toysmart (2000-2001) or DoubleClick (1999-2001) cases.

Italy and Germany now appear to have implemented their versions of the EU copyright directive. The Italian version became effective on 28th April 2003.

The Royal Society in the UK have produced an interesting new report "Keeping science open: the effects of intellectual property policy on the conduct of science". It emphasises the fundamental requirement that for science to thrive, there needs to be "a free flow of ideas and information" and that IPRs can interfere with this through encouraging a climate of secrecy. "The merits of universities actively obtaining IPRs, as opposed to disseminating knowledge and allowing industry to protect its developments, are not well documented and would be worthy of further study in the UK." It highlights the damgers of the overreaching effects of unbalanced intellectual property laws and given the distinguished panel of people who put the report together, including the late Roger Needham, merits considerable thought.

The Introduction gives a taste of the direction of the report in its opening paragraphs:

"Productive scientific research requires free and rapid flow and exchange of information. The presence or process of securing formal intellectual property rights (IPRs) may restrist this flow, and thus can impede or conflict with the effective development of science.

Yet IPRs can simultaneously encourage innovation by leading to reward, and permit publication by scientists in industry of information that would otherwise be withheld. IPRs can therefore increase actual information availability, flow and use, and thus the rate of progress of science. Achieving the right balance between the encouragement of innovation and information flow, and the extent to which restrictions need to be inherent in IPRs, is an important issue of public policy. Many believe that the current balance is not optimal and additionally is eroding the area of common knowledge that is the very foundation of science. We have therefore considered whether there could be improvements in the way intellectual property law, its interpretation and it use impact on science."

The summary concludes (p.vi):

"There are some overarching aspects of IP law that are as relevant today
as they have ever been. One is that the law does, by its nature, confer
exclusive rights on the rightholder in exchange for well-defined rights
for society. A good balance provides just sufficient incentive to
encourage research and development by potential rightholders but retains
a high level of benefit for society.

Advances of technology and commercial forces have led to new IP
legislation and case law that unreasonably and unnecessarily restrict
freedom to access and to use information. This restriction of the
commons in the main IP areas of patents, copyright and database right
has changed the balance of rights and hampers scientific endeavour. In
the interests of society, that balance must be rectified."

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.

Information Commons on Larry Lessig on the no photos policy at Starbucks

Information Commons have started a weblog. Really interesting.

I neglected to point out Larry Lessig's concerns about Starbucks accusing snap happy customers of copyright infringement of their environment.

Microsoft and AOL have reached a settlement. MS pay AOL $750M; AOL drops the lawsuit and they agree to cooperate in future on things like instant messaging.
http://news.com.com/2100-1032-1011296.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/30/technology/30AOL.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB10542388475007100,00.html
Two less that satisfying stories from a Microsoft perspective - the President of India, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, is promoting open source and the local governement in Munich are switching 14000 computers from Windows to Linux.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-1011255.html
http://news.com.com/2100-1016-1010740.html?tag=nl
Bill and Steve, however, must be delighted at the war that has broken out between SCO and the Linux community about proprietary elements of UNIX being allegedly incorporated into Linux. There have even been rumours, denied as an unlikely course of action, that SCO might sue Linus Torvards for copright infringement.
http://news.com.com/2100-1016-1011263.html

Nice quote from Paul Goldstein's Copyright's Highway: From Guttenberg to the Celestial Jukebox (1994) - he says copyright's goal is to give "the public the widest variety of literary and artistic works at the lowest possible price."  (p228) On p224: "The capacity for the celestial jukebox to post a charge for access, and to shut off service if a subscriber does not pay his bills, should substantially reduce the specter of transaction costs.  As these costs dissolve, so, too, should the perceived need for safety valves like fair use. Indeed the economic logic of the celestial jukebox....might produce a law that contains no exemptions from liability at all.... as suppliers oblige their subscribers contractually to pay for now exempted uses of copyrighted material..... One problem with this logic is that the celestial jukebox will not entirely replace traditional copyright markets... Also, some of the 1976 Act's exemptions are there, not because of transaction costs, but because certain uses and users serve socially valuable ends.  The statuatory exemption for classroom performances  of copyrighted works in nonprofit educational institutions is one example.  If copyright owners try to circumvent these copyright exemptions by contract - and there is every reason to expect they will - Congress will have to reconsider the distributional aspects of its copyright agenda and decide whether to outlaw such contracts...."
Goldstein would firmly reject Larry Lessig's notions about copyright extension being unnecessary. He is of the opinion that technological development eroded copyright revenues because eg. people got used to using the VCR without paying for copies because Congress did not act quickly enough to deal with it.  And once people are used to getting something for "free" they will not want to pay for it and Congress is unlikely to make them.  So he says hand out the copyright scope extensions to prevent damage to copyright holders, then assess later the effect.  Lessig on the other hand would say avoid handing out monoplies until the real effect of the technological development can be evaluated.  After all, Jack Valenti was against VCRs and now videos provide huge revenues for the movie industry.
Goldstein's book is terrific.
Goldstein concludes the book on p236: ".. and true to copyright's historic logic that the best prescription for connecting authors to their audiences is to extend rights into every corner where consumers derive value from literary and artistic works.  If history is any measure, the result should be to promote political as well as cultural diversity, ensuring a plenitude of voices, with all the chance to be heard." Hmmm.
Peter Drahos would probably join Lessig, Jamie Boyle, Pamela Samuelson and others in disputing that perspective. I seem to remember Drahos saying that when it comes to intellectual property, "the language of property rights should be replaced by the language of privileges." He also suggested that the holders of "intellectual property privileges" should be subject to such duties as "would maximise the probably that the purpose for which the privilege was first created is achieved."

Pamela Samuelson has produced her usual sound analysis of copyright law to bear in her assessment of the wake of the Eldred v Ashcroft Supreme Court decision.

The Eurpoean Parliament's committee on legal affairs and the internal market has reportedly criticised the proposed directive on harmonising the enforcement of intellectual property rights as not going far enough to protect the movies and music industries.

Meanwhile, Oracle is suing Quest for copyright infringement, in relation to its database software and Disney have come up with a plan to rent self destructing DVDs. These stories can get really entertaining don't you think?

There's a fair bit of speculation about the possible retirement of US Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist this coming summer.

John Naughton writes about the IHT's aquisition of Microsoft memos outling their approach to competing with Linux - if Linux is a serious competitor then give the MS software away.

Larry Lessig wants copyright owners to pay $1 to renew copyright after fifty years.
"The idea is a simple one: Fifty years after a work has been published, the copyright owner must pay a
$1 maintanence fee. If the copyright owner pays the fee, then the copyright continues. If the owner
fails to pay the fee, the work passes into the public domain. Based on historical precedent, we expect
98% of copyrighted works would pass into the public domain after just 50 years. They could keep
Mickey for as long as Congress lets them. But we would get a public domain........
Yet the lobbyists are fighting even this tiny compromise. The public domain is competition for them.
They will fight this competition. And so long as they have the lobbyists, and the rest of the world
remains silent, they will win.

We need to your help to resist this now. At this stage, all that we need is one congressperson to
introduce the proposal. Whether you call it the Copyright Term Deregulation Act, or the Public
Domain Enhancement Act, doesn’t matter. What matters is finding a sponsor, so we can begin to
show the world just how extreme this debate has become: They have already gotten a 20 year
extension of all copyrights just so 2% can benefit; and now they object to paying just $1 for that
benefit, so that no one else might compete with them."

Can't go without pointing you at Derek Slater's excellent A Copyfighter's Musings today.

Privacy International say that UK law enforcement authorities get one million customer records per year from communications providers, according to ZDNet UK.

There's some confusion surrounding a case of secondary copyright infringement which Amazon appear to have lost. The plaintiff, Robert Hendrikson, had previously lost a similar case invloving the same materials against eBay. eBay were able to claim the "safe harbour" protection (presumably section 236?) of the DMCA to avoid liability. Amazon lost on the same defence but there is no written opinion from the judge, so Amazon say they're going to seek clarification of the infringement order.

Intuit are removing DRM and product activation from their tax software.

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) have sued a website CIRAWatch.com for libel over an article an article "alleging that CIRA’s validation process for domain name registrations discriminated against certain ethnic communities."

There's a lot of fairly high profile netlaw news around today, including 321 Studios facing the movie industry in court, a company called SCO threatening big linux users with infringing intellectual property rights. I suggest you have a look at Michael Geist's BNA Internet Law News for links to the breaking stories.

Corante point at an interesting International Herald Tribune story about Miscosoft memo suggesting a strategy in their continuing efforts to deal with linux. Basically it amounts to giving massive discounts to governments where Linux may be a competitor.

Labour MP Yvette Cooper is defending the Human Rights Act today in the Guardian.

There's a nice account of how Disney slipped two no fly zones (over their theme parks) through Congress over at Aero-News.net.

The Open University's T182 Law the Internet and Society: Tecnology and the Future of Ideas has encouraged at least a couple of bloggers. The links I thought I had included to these don't seem to have taken. If at first you don't succeed try try again.

Bruce Schneier calls this a funny password story.

The Open University's T182 Law the Internet and Society: Tecnology and the Future of Ideas has encouraged at least a couple of bloggers.

According to Ziff Davis eWeek a South Korean group is suing Microsoft for negligence over the damage caused by the SQL Slammer worm. Now that will be an interesting one to watch. Microsoft's licences (like most software licences) pretty much require users to sign away the right to sue but the article seems to suggest that South Korea's Product Liability Act may provide a route around the get-out clause.

Privacy International are launching a campaign to encourage people to submit subject access requests to telcos and ISPs. This is in response to the UK government's ongoing plans on data retention.

The Open University in the UK have just brought out a course called T182 Law the Internet and Society: Tecnology and the Future of Ideas based on Larry Lessig's book, The Future of Ideas. A beginners guide to Larry Lessig's ideas about the importance of law and architecture in formulating the future of the Net and everything it affects. You can see a sample of the material online.

James Boyle has just published the latest edition of LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS journal, based on the amazing conference on the public domain held at Duke University in November 2001.

David Weinberger has combined rule bending and copy protection in a nice article in Wired. David is an end to end advocate.

Robin Gross of IP Justice recently did a very accessible paper on her perspective of the European Union's copyright directive. Donna Wentworth and other copyfighters are currently focussing on the media concentration debate and the FCC's imminent decision on "de-regulation".

Mike Godwin's come up with an interesting solution for the digital television transition. He's now working as lead counsel for Public Knowledge

Ernie the Attorney on the recent Richard Posner speech criticising the expansion of copyright law. Doc Searls on IP v Net protocols at Comdex.

Findlaw article on the Pavlovich DeCSS case. Jurisdiction depending on intent and what constitues an active or passive website? Ernest Miller doesn't consider it too enlightening a commentary, though.

Is this real or a sad reflection of the risk aversity we're locking ourselves into as a society? Not a very bright thing to do but is saying on a bus "We're going to the taliban don't worry about it" sufficient to create this kind of fuss? Apparently so. I guess this is one bus driver who won't be making any more terrorist jokes.

Looks like the general decline in standards of maths is being used to someone's advantage. Specifically an Andras Pellionisz, who is seeking a patent on a scientific method, using mathematical techniques to study DNA. But then Amazon did get a patent on the one click business method and Roger Schlafly did get a patent on two prime numbers. So why should this be surprising?