Seth Schoen uses the changes TiVo have embraced (ie drm) as a platform to explore the convergence of computers and consumer electronics devices, on Dave Farber's interesting people list.

"the smart cards and set-top boxes would decrypt the programming as it came into
your house and verify that you were authorized to receive it. But
then they would encrypt it again in order to enforce _copyright
holder_ policies about what you could do with it after you had
received it. That re-encryption makes the new generation of pay
TV services (after you've paid for them) different from free TV
services because the pay TV services can be subject to additional
controls after the point of lawful reception.

The FCC was asked to ban this re-encryption -- in a sense, to limit
the use of encryption under the 1996 Act to making sure that you
initially pay for pay TV, not to controlling what you do with it
afterward. In a decision in 2000, the Commission declined to do
this...


This decision was unfortunate in its implications because it vastly
increased the potential leverage that movie studios would have over
technology companies. If the FCC had forbidden re-encryption of
pay TV programming, companies like TiVo would not need to negotiate
with movie studios (or broadcast groups) in order to get lawful access
to pay TV...

And TiVo has chosen to do exactly that...

Of course, that negotiation has come at a corresponding cost: TiVo
implements digital rights management, takes steps (to date not very
strong steps) to control reverse engineering and aftermark
modifications, and generally implements a lot of restrictions on
recorded programming...

TiVo customers are obviously happy enough with this strategy that they
keep buying TiVos in large numbers, although there is a devoted
community of "TiVo hacking" enthusiasts who learn how to add
functionality to their TiVos -- and they have a very complicated
relationship with these restrictions...

There is an alternative -- if you only want to receive unencrypted
TV (free-to-air terrestrial broadcasting and basic-tier cable in
the U.S., and possibly these plus certain types of pay TV in Europe).
You can use a personal computer as a PVR by putting one or more TV
cards inside. Then you can run software that turns the PC into a PVR.
One of the most impressive programs along these lines is an open
source package called MythTV

http://www.mythtv.org/

which has already implemented functionality competitive with TiVo's
PVR functionality, plus features that TiVo won't touch...

The major movie
studios have persuaded the FCC to change the rules for unencrypted
digital television to apply DRM there, in the "broadcast flag" or
"digital broadcast content protection" proceeding. (That's why I
say that the FCC is unlikely to change the DRM requirement for
cable TV!) The result is that the equipment that makes a program
like MythTV work with U.S. digital television will be illegal to
manufacture here from July 1, 2005. If you want to use something
like MythTV for digital TV in the future, your best bet is to buy
the equipment before then. MythTV works well with the pcHDTV
HD-3000 card, which is finally shipping:

http://www.pchdtv.com/ ...

I would not get so worked up about any one action that TiVo takes.
We know their strategy, and it involves co-operating with movie
studios to impose restrictions on end users. The reasons why they
do this are not mysterious. If you want to criticize TiVo -- and
that's fine with me! -- the right place to start is much earlier in
the company's history.

But if you actually want to opt out of the DRM game, it seems to
me that the thing to do is to spread the remaining unrestricted
technologies as far and wide as possible while they're still legal...

I've often thought of writing an essay called "converging up,
converging down?" about the ambiguity of the "convergence" ideal.
PCs and consumer electronics (CE) devices have very different
characteristics -- beyond just the technical differences, veering
into cultural differences -- even though today they are usually
made out of the same chips. Among other things, PCs in the past
were friendlier to user innovation and third party innovation; you
could teach them to do more. CE devices in the past were much more
single-function and fixed-function, and upgrades (if available)
typically had to be provided by the manufacturer. Ultimately PCs
were much more under end user control and CE devices much more
under the manuacturer's control. Movie studios have appreciated
this distinction; they have better, older, and closer relationships
with the CE industries than with the PC industries...

If these device families actually do "converge", on whose terms
will they converge? Will the PC grow more like a DVD player (or
a TiVo), or will the PVR and cell phone grow more like PCs? And,
since "being like a PC" or "being like a CE box" is not just a
single dimension, in _which ways_ will they become more like one
another? Which particular characteristics will each now imitate...

In terms of end user control, there is an opportunity for CE devices
to converge up (enhancing customers' control) and a risk of PC
devices converging down (eroding it). I think the world the
entertainment companies have built is providing exactly the wrong
incentive at every point as this question is worked out."

Spread unrestricted technologies as far and wide as possible whilst they are still legal? Now where have I heard that before? Well Charles Nesson at the Berkman Center has taken this position the introduction of controls to the Internet - the message being don't waste your energy complaining about those terrible entities introducing restrictions for their own ends but rather get on with using the Net creatively and demonstrating to the world what potential it has.

Somebody has asked me if there is a quick way of understanding Larry Lessig's ideas on copyright. Well he's done lots of excellent public lectures and interviews, many available on the Internet, such as this KQED debate with intellectual property lawyer, Jeffrey Knowles.

Ernest Miller is dreaming about the server in the closet of every home.

"I remain enamored of a concept I think of as the "server in the closet." I believe that, eventually, every home will have a fairly sophisticated server as the locus of the many networked device in the home. Everything from the VoIP phone system, presence-enabled media (IM), multimedia (podcasts, broadcatch), etc., etc., etc. There will be fat and thin clients in the home, all of which can be (but not required to) coordinate through home's central server. More importantly, this "server in the closet" will be part of bi-directional communication with the rest of the world wide network, turning every home not only into a receiver, but a transmitter."

James Grimmelmann has some strong words about "Two Skirmishes in the DRM Wars: Half-Life 2 and Halo 2" over at Lawmeme:

"people who tried to log in to Microsoft's X-Box Live service to play Halo 2 with hacked X-Boxes have found their accounts suspended.

And on the other hand, copies of Half-Life 2 have started hitting retail shelves in advance of the "official" release date of November 16. Gamers who rush out to buy (sometimes extortionately priced) copies early, however, are finding themselves stymied: the game won't install without verification from Steam, the online platform Valve (Half-Life 2's creator) uses to deliver its games and coordinate online play. But Steam won't turn the game on until the 16th, per instructions from Vivendi (Half-Life 2's distributor).

Let's call these schemes by their right name: these are both examples of digital rights management working as intended. This is the future of digital media, here today: your copy of the product checks in with home base to determine what you can and can't do with it. And when the company that runs home base decides that it doesn't like what you're doing (be it tampering with your device's hardware or trying--oh the temerity!--to play a game a few days early), it can cut you off at the knees and disable your access to the game. That's what DRM does. Hey, gamers: you're getting a taste of the treatment the music industry has planned for us all. Do you like it?

Now, not all DRM is created equal. Microsoft's choice here was reasonably fair, I think. You can do whatever you want to your 'Box, but don't expect to be able to use a modded 'Box to compete against people who are playing by the rules. I look at X-Box Live as a kind of virtual world; it's not unreasonable for Microsoft to act as a referee by insisting that everyone who enters that world enter it on the same terms...

...The Steam lockout is more frightening, though. First off, note why it is that Valve won't turn the key: a contractual dispute with Vivendi. In fact, Valve and Vivendi are locked in a fierce legal struggle over distribution terms, with Vivendi furious that Steam might undercut its revenues from store-based sales. That's right: your ability to play Half-Life 2 is being held hostage to a licensing fight between two corporations."

One of my students has reminded me that the November issue (12.11) of Wired magazine comes with a CD containing a collection of songs released under a creative commons license.

Microsoft have launched a global egovernment network, called the "Solutions Sharing Network" or SSN.

In the same spirit of sharing, the NHS National Programme for IT (NPFIT)will be rolling out the PR department next year to let people know about the new NHS IT systems and the implications regarding sharing of personal data. I wonder if they'll be referring to doctors concerns about the lack of security of records the new systems may be displaying? Sorry - cheap shot - but I couldn't resist it.

Sun are trying the open source business model with their new operating system, Solaris 10, which they are giving away free, in the hope that it will greatly expand the user base.

Cindy Cohn and Annalee Newitz at the EFF have written a very interesting and thoughtful paper on spam:
Noncommercial Email Lists:Collateral Damage in the Fight Against Spam, suggesting that non commercial mailing lists are suffering disproportionate "collateral damage" in the fight against spam.

My own organisation, the Open University, uses spam management filters and I'm grateful for these because I deal with tens of thousands of emails each year. The result of this avalanche of email is that unless an individual email gains my attention virtually immediately it gets deleted. And anything flagged by spam filters gets instantly deleted.

Cohn and Newitz are right to question the principles, processes and mechanics of spam filtering tools but just as we have information management systems in organisations to filter the right bits of paper and the right phone calls through to the most appropriate people we need information management systems in the electronic realm. How to square that with a sensitivity to be aware of and committment to avoid censorship and maintenance of the end to end architecture of the Net is a complex question to which there are no simple answers.

Bruce Schneier on electronic voting, essential reading.

"After 2000, voting machine problems made
international headlines. The government appropriated money to fix the
problems nationwide. Unfortunately, electronic voting machines --
although presented as the solution -- have largely made the problem
worse. This doesn't mean that these machines should be abandoned, but
they need to be designed to increase both their accuracy, and people's
trust in their accuracy. This is difficult, but not impossible...

...Computer security experts are unanimous on what to do. (Some voting
experts disagree, but I think we're all much better off listening to
the computer security experts. The problems here are with the
computer, not with the fact that the computer is being used in a voting
application.) And they have two recommendations:

1. DRE machines must have a voter-verifiable paper audit trails
(sometimes called a voter-verified paper ballot). This is a paper
ballot printed out by the voting machine, which the voter is allowed to
look at and verify. He doesn't take it home with him. Either he looks
at it on the machine behind a glass screen, or he takes the paper and
puts it into a ballot box. The point of this is twofold. One, it
allows the voter to confirm that his vote was recorded in the manner he
intended. And two, it provides the mechanism for a recount if there
are problems with the machine.

2. Software used on DRE machines must be open to public
scrutiny. This also has two functions. One, it allows any interested
party to examine the software and find bugs, which can then be
corrected. This public analysis improves security. And two, it
increases public confidence in the voting process. If the software is
public, no one can insinuate that the voting system has unfairness
built into the code. (Companies that make these machines regularly
argue that they need to keep their software secret for security
reasons. Don't believe them. In this instance, secrecy has nothing to
do with security.)...


...Proponents of DREs often point to successful elections as "proof" that
the systems work. That completely misses the point. The fear is that
errors in the software -- either accidental or deliberately introduced
-- can undetectably alter the final tallies. An election without any
detected problems is no more a proof the system is reliable and secure
than a night that no one broke into your house is proof that your door
locks work. Maybe no one tried, or maybe someone tried and
succeeded...and you don't know it.

Even if we get the technology right, we still won't be done. If the
goal of a voting system is to accurately translate voter intent into a
final tally, the voting machine is only one part of the overall
system. In the 2004 U.S. election, problems with voter registration,
untrained poll workers, ballot design, and procedures for handling
problems resulted in far more votes not being counted than problems
with the technology. But if we're going to spend money on new voting
technology, it makes sense to spend it on technology that makes the
problem easier instead of harder."

It's a subscription only sevice but the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the cross jurisdictional Gutnick v Dow Jones internet defamation case has been settled out of court. Dow Jones lost their fight to have the Australian courts declare that the case should have been heard in the US. Interesting timing in the light of the UK Court of Appeal decision in the Don King v Lennox Lewis case last week.

Coincidentally, a Canadian archaeologist was awarded large damages in another Net libel case last week. The report claims there has been very little case law in the area of Internet defamation but actually there have been quite a few cases in the US streching back to Cubby v Compuserve in the early 1990s, Stratton v Prodigy and a string of others since. In Autralia Gutnick v Dow Jones has been the precendent setter and in the UK it was Godfrey v Demon. So there are plenty of legal arguments available for Canadian judges to peruse on matters of principle and law, albeit from different juridictions.

Rohde to Srebrenica is a human rights case study project of the Columbia Graduate School of
Journalism, based on David Rohde’s reporting on mass graves in Bosnia.

Computer loophole hits hi-tech NHS trial says the Sunday Times. Apparently there are security problems with the appointments booking system, which gives all doctors access to all GPs' patient records and the facility to edit them.

Also from Sunday, Dan Gillmor laments Microsoft's ability to buy its way out of trouble.

"Microsoft's $536 million settlement with Novell, which had sued on antitrust claims, was big money for Novell. It was less than pocket change for Microsoft, which at last count had nearly $65 billion in cash and short-term investments -- and not a dime of debt.

In a slew of financial settlements with companies Microsoft has trampled over the years, the payout for wrongdoing is roughly $3 billion to date. That represents about three months of profit for a company that literally can't spend its cash fast enough, and is giving shareholders a one-time bonus of $3 a share early next month. That payout will put only a temporary dent in the cash hoard.

What does all this mean? Simple. When governments fail to enforce the rules of capitalism, monopoly profits can buy one's way out of almost any kind of trouble...

...n a report last week about Microsoft's new search technology, for example, the Wall Street Journal observed: ``Microsoft brings a big wallet and a track record of coming from behind in areas that it deems critical. The company belatedly recognized the importance of the Internet and ultimately steamrolled Netscape Communications in Web browser software.''

You'll note there's not even a hint here that one of Microsoft's most essential tactics in achieving that browser dominance was breaking the law. Even the best and most important business newspaper in the world can't be bothered to remember history."

Not Microsoft's biggest fan.

According to the Washington Post, the US Transportation Security Administration has ordered 72 airlines to hand over passenger data to test their new screening program Secure Flight.

The reporter worries that "Any U.S. carrier that shared information with the TSA about European passengers on flights overseas could be placed in a legal bind between the two continents", so presumably is not aware of EU Commissioner Bolkestein's agreement with the US on airline pasenger data sharing. OF course that agreement is currently being challenged by the EU parliament in the European Court of Justice, so her cocerns may well become substantive if the Court does eventually outlaw the agreement.

Creative Commons: Proposal to Explore a Science Commons

So important I hope they don't mind me copying it here in full:

Establishing a Science Commons

The Problem: The sciences depend on access to and use of factual data. Powered by developments in electronic storage and computational capability, scientific inquiry is becoming more data-intensive in almost every discipline. Whether the field is meteorology, genomics, medicine, or high-energy physics, research depends on the availability of multiple databases, from multiple public and private sources, and their openness to easy recombination, search and processing. In the United States, this process has traditionally been supported by a series of policies, laws, and practices that were largely invisible even to those who worked in the sciences themselves.

First, American intellectual property law (and, until recently, the law of most developed countries) did not allow for intellectual property protection of "raw facts." One could patent the mousetrap, not the data on the behavior of mice, or the tensile strength of steel. A scientific article could be copyrighted. The data on which it rested could not be. Commercial proprietary ownership was to be limited to a stage close to the point where a finished product entered the marketplace. The data upstream remained for all the world to use.

Second, US law mandated that even those federal government works that could be copyrighted, fell immediately into the public domain - a provision of great importance given massive governmental involvement in scientific research. More broadly, the practice in federally funded scientific research was to encourage the widespread dissemination of data at or below cost in the belief that, like the interstate system, this provision of a public good would yield incalculable economic benefits.

Third, in the sciences themselves, and particularly in the universities, a strong sociological tradition - sometimes called the Mertonian tradition of open science - discouraged the proprietary exploitation of data (as opposed to inventions derived from data) and required as a condition of publication and replication the datasets on which the work was based.

Each of these three central tenets is now either under attack or subject to serious reservations. For example, in the genetic realm, patent law has moved perilously close to being an intellectual property right over raw facts - the C's, G's A's and T's of a particular gene sequence. In other areas, complex contracts of adhesion create de facto intellectual property rights over databases, complete with "reach through agreements" and multiple limitations on use. More disturbingly, the US is considering and the EU has adopted a "database right" which actually does accord intellectual property protection to facts - upsetting one of the most fundamental premises of intellectual property: that one could never own facts, or ideas, only the inventions or expressions yielded by their intersection.

The Federal government's role is also changing. Under the pressure of the important (and in many ways admirable) Bayh-Dole statute federally funded research in universities is now pushed towards early proprietary exploitation; universities become partners in privatizing and exploiting the fruits of research. While this is a good idea when it encourages the conversion of science into useful products brought to market, it is questionable when the proprietary pressures occur "upstream" at the most fundamental level of data and research. At the same time, universities depend more and more on their intellectual property portfolios, both for income and for positioning in relationships and negotiations with other institutions and for-profit entities.

Under these twin pressures, the third leg of the tripod is also beginning to crack. Scientists may be bound up in confidentiality agreements. Proprietary concerns limit or prohibit the transfer of the full datasets on which they work. Often unconsciously, institutions have begun to encourage secretive practices they formerly frowned on. Science policy, too, has begun to change as universities can no longer be depended on to play the role of public defender for the public domain that they traditionally played in the legislative realm. Around the world, government departments have begun to look at datasets as a source of revenue to be exploited, rather than a public good to be provided. The important National Academy study, Bits of Power, records the tragic consequences that this tendency had in access to satellite and weather data.

Importantly for Creative Commons, many of the tendencies here involve both a collective action problem and a race to the bottom. Universities as a whole might be better off if more data were freely available; for an individual university to pursue such a policy alone is hard, and sometimes foolish: one is reluctant to give away that for which everyone else charges a high price. The same tendency occurs in different ways outside the university setting. The US government frequently buys the same data many times from private parties (private satellite companies, for example). Individual departments do not necessarily have incentives to try and make a deal that will benefit the government or the public as a whole. The same is true when government agencies provide data to private companies who add value to it, and offer it back with better search functions or improved interfaces, but subject to major contractual and legal restraints beyond the particular agency involved. Ideally, there would be standard agreements under which such deals were cut which maximized general social value and research availability, rather than only reflecting the budgetary or research interests of one particular agency.

The Search for a Solution: These facts have not gone unnoticed. Numerous scientists have pointed out the tragic irony that, right at the historical moment when we have the technologies to permit worldwide availability and distributed processing of scientific data and their concomitant promise for broadening collaboration and accelerating the pace and depth of discovery, we are busy locking up that data and slapping legal restrictions on transfer. Learned societies including the National Academies of Sciences, federal granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation, and other groups have all expressed concern about the trends that are developing. Much attention has been focused on proposals for legislative change, which - while important - will be both extremely hard to push through and an incomplete solution. Any solution will be need to be as complex as the problem it seeks to solve, which is to say it will be interdisciplinary, multinational, and involve both public and private initiatives. What's more, judicious balance is needed: the tendency to claim that property rights are never the answer, or that openness always solves all problems, must be avoided.

Enter "Science Commons": Creative Commons was formed to deal with a problem of access to materials caused by the conjunction of technological developments - computers' increasing capability to store and process data vastly enhanced in effect by interconnection via the World Wide Web - and legal change. With much at stake and so many stakeholders, the debate over control of creative work and information now tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control in which every last use of a work - or even data - is regulated and in which "all rights reserved" (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy, a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation.

In many arenas the default rule, or standard operating procedure, has become "lock it up". Balance, compromise and moderation, once the driving forces of an intellectual property system that balanced private reward with public gain and protection with innovation, have become endangered species. Creative Commons is working to revive these principles and practices. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses.

Creative Commons now enables creators to select among various license options to make their work available to the public on generous terms, and then applies three layers of licenses (in legal, lay and machine-readable languages) and descriptive metadata to their work. Attendant to our development of licenses and Internet applications enabling creators to license their work to the public, we are also engaged in these projects (among others):

Tagging various kinds of file formats with Creative Commons metadata

Increasing the number of ways people can search for free or licensed work in an end-to-end system without relying on a centralized, authoritative database

Developing tools, services and educational projects to enable alternatives to maximum content control

Translating the Creative Commons system into numerous languages and national or regional legal systems (including special licensing provision for developing nations)

Connecting with the World Wide Web Consortium to promote "semantic web" tools to allow machines to communicate a richer set of information about files and pages on the Net.

Forging agreements with universities, tech companies, and others with competing interests to enhance the public's access to proprietary content. See http://creativecommons.org/learn/collaborators.

CC's charge initially was entirely in the cultural and copyright realms - in the world of music, texts, blogs, pictures, films, and so on. Nevertheless, at the first board meeting, the founding board members expressed strong interest in the possibilities of developing the creative commons model in the scientific area, should it appear that the technologies and expertise we were developing might usefully apply there. Several times, in fact, board members expressed the feeling that the Creative Commons approach might be more of a "killer app" in science than in culture. Recognizing that developing open pathways for scientific research will be complex and contentious, the Creative Commons board did not feel that at that point we had the expertise or the technical capability to enter this field. We now believe that we do.

What could Creative Commons bring to the world of science? In a single sentence, the answer is this. Creative Commons is a disinterested party with remarkable experience in the formation and deployment of well-written, accessible, machine- and human-readable licenses that guarantee wider availability of material while preserving some selected intellectual property rights. Along with scientists, patent and university IP lawyers and scholars, we believe that this particular conjunction of features might encourage an enormously valuable thaw against the freeze-in of scientific data. We anticipate that there will be a major role for well-written, standard form, machine- and human-readable agreements:

Between funders and grant recipients, requiring greater access to data.

Between universities and researchers, prohibiting collectively the most toxic types of restrictions on data, and guaranteeing a level and open playing field of access to data.

Between government agencies who are purchasing data from or providing data to, private commercial concerns, so as to develop standard terms that benefited the public and research as a whole.

In any or all of these areas, a Science Commons division of Creative Commons could play an important role.

Advantages:

i.) Disinterest: Unlike universities, scientists, learned societies, publishers, or the National Science Foundation, Creative Commons is neither a provider nor a recipient of research science dollars. We do not produce, consume, sell or distribute scientific data, nor rely on its openness, or its restriction for our existence. To differing extents, every other group at the table has a particular set of interests in the outcome of debates on this issue - some of which might be more or less congruent with the public interest. Our position of relative disinterest might help to facilitate a role in the discussions - whether as "honest broker," technical and legal advisor, or policy entrepreneurs, bringing new solutions to old problems.

ii.) Experience in Licensing Solutions: Many of the things that we have learned in forming the Creative Commons do not translate completely to the world of science policy. We dealt primarily with copyright - here the issues would also involve patent and trade secret. We were dealing with a very large number of individuals with little legal expertise who were not repeat players in the system. Here we would dealing both with individuals who fit that model to some extent (scientists, low level administrators in government departments). But we would also be dealing with well-funded sophisticated repeat players (universities, national funding bodies.) Nevertheless, a number of the types of expertise that Creative Commons has developed valuably apply here.

Machine Readability: It might be advantageous for some datasets to travel with their electronically expressed licenses. The ability to combine those datasets without worrying about obscure contracts hidden in some general counsel's office a continent away would be a major benefit.

Human Readability: We have considerable expertise in writing licenses that non-lawyers (in this case, scientists, researchers and administrators) can understand. If material is to be open in practice, rather than in theory, this will be a vital point.

The drafting process: The process of drafting the licenses in such fields will be extremely complex, involving negotiating skills, and the need for widely respected, disinterested and legally expert participants. It will also require considerable involvement from different communities, and - above all - the need to secure "buy in" from the various groups involved, all of whom have incentives to want it to succeed, but have differing interests that have to be explained, translated and negotiated. Creative Commons has a fair amount of experience in these tasks, experience that would appear to have a role to play in the world of science, supported by active pro bono representation by several top law firms.

Internet Architecture and Software Development: Our Technical Advisory Board, headed by one of our directors, Hal Abelson (Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT), couples extraordinary sophistication in the architecture and functionality of the Internet with great skill in writing software for our applications.

iii) Recognition and good will: Launched in December, 2002, Creative Commons quickly established itself as an important, innovative player. Numerous prominent institutions and organizations have adopted Creative Commons* licenses to make their content available online to the public. Examples include

MIT's Open Courseware project,
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

Berklee School of Music, Berklee Shares online education project
http://www.berkleeshares.com

Rice University's Connexions, interactive courseware and repository,
http://cnx.rice.edu/

The Public Library of Science, a world-class open-access journal,
http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/

OYEZ, audio archives of U.S. Supreme Court arguments since 1950s
http://oyez.org

Opsound, an archive of hundreds of openly licensed sounds and songs,
http://www.opsound.org

The Internet Archive, a nonprofit offering free hosting of text, audio, video, and web materials,
http://www.archive.org

eMultimedia Training Kit, training materials sponsored and used by UNESCO,
http://www.itrainonline.org/itrainonline/mmtk/index.shtml

A search on All-the-Web (a popular search engine) shows more than 1,000,000 licenses back-linked to Creative Commons. Searches on Google for the phrase "This work is licensed under a Creative Commons license" (the words attached to every licensed work) increased 316% between February to July 2003. In addition to substantial grants in place from the MacArthur Foundation and the Foundation for the Public Domain, in July 2003 Creative Commons was awarded a $1 million grant from the Hewlett Foundation.

Suggested Reading:

Bits of Power: Issues in Global Access to Scientific Data, National Academies Press (1997), http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/BitsOfPower.

Jerome Reichman & Paul Uhlir, A Contractually Reconstructed Research Commons for Scientific Data in a Highly Protectionist Intellectual Property Environment 66 Law & Contemp. Probs. 315 (Winter/Spring 2003), http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?66+Law+&+Contemp.+Probs.+315+(WinterSpring+2003).

Essays on the Public Domain, (special editor James Boyle) Law & Contemporary Problems 2003, http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/lcp/indexpd.htm.

Professor Pamela Samuelson is offering a course on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Technology: Legal and Policy Challenges in the Spring of 2005. Her comprehensive reading list will provide anyone who tackles it seriously with a sound grasp of the issues.

From The Guardian, "The European commission, which fined Microsoft a record €497m (£345) this year for abusing its dominant position, yesterday vowed to continue pursuing the US software group through the courts for anti-competitive behaviour...

...EC officials were scathing about Microsoft's alleged efforts to "buy the silence" of rivals. On Monday it reached a $536m settlement with software maker Novell, and a ceasefire with the US Computer and Communications Industry Association. As part of the settlements, both withdrew from the Brussels case."

Finalist number 10 in the Nokia shorts contest takes a dig at the cinema ads about copyright infringement.

Some cinemas do indeed now monitor the cinema audience with night vision goggles. The severity of the sanctions imposed upon someone caught illegally recording from the big screen usually amount to getting ejected from the film and reported to the police.

Contrary to the claims of the copyright notices UK cinemas now display before film showings, however, copyright infringement is not yet a criminal offence in the UK. This will probably change when the intellectual property rights enforcement directive, passed by the EU earlier this year, eventually gets implemented in the UK.

Using a camcorder in a cinema is a crime in some areas of the US, such as California, however, and there have been a number of people arrested under the relevant statute passed in January 2004.

The conspiracy theorists are flying with the idea that the electronic voting machines were hacked to swing the US Presidential election for George Bush.

I'll need to see more evidence than the claim that the exit polls could not have been so wrong. But expect this one to run for a while.

In the thick of lots of other things I neglected to report that the European Court of Justice turned down the EU Parliament's request for a speedy review of the agreement between the EU and US on airline passenger data sharing. The decision was on procedural grounds - the Parliament essentially used the wrong forms and asked for the wrong things in the wrong way.

The Court's substantive review of the agreement will still go ahead but we're unlikely to get a decision now before the end of 2007, by which time we should have some empirical data on real impact of the agreement.

The MPAA have decided the time is right to sue hundreds of individuals who apparently download films illegally over P2P networks.