Archive for May, 2005

“Trusted Computing” is here; probably BAD news

Monday, May 30th, 2005

Still in NYC and have no time to write. See this story about "Trusted Computing" on Slashdot. Don't know about TC? See this article on EFF that discusses the pros and cons. About halfway down, you'll notice one particular problem: TC is deployed to threat YOU, THE END USER as a ...

Secret Senate Hearings on New PATRIOT Act

Thursday, May 26th, 2005

Can't write much; I'm at the ICA convention in NYC. :-) Check this awesome Philadelphia Inquirer editorial blasting the new PATRIOT Act. (Use BugMeNot.com to avoid signing up.) More info from the ACLU and EFF. (EFF link is an action alert for the good people of Kansas, Utah, Ohio, Missouri, Maine, Nebraska, ...

Google v. University Presses

Wednesday, May 25th, 2005

Here's a copyright battle with no clear moral high ground: University presses are rankled by Google's plans to scan almost every book of any scholarly value into a gigantic, searchable database. Google hasn't entirely tipped its hand yet, so I'm not making any predictions or throwing my weight behing either side ...

PTO director to 6th graders: avoid P2P

Tuesday, May 24th, 2005

Today on C|Net: Legacy Elementary School, in suburban Salt Lake City, Utah, is holding its graduation ceremony today. Jon Dudas, director of US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), is delivering the commencement address. Dudas is using the speech as a platform for lecturing children about the perils of peer-to-peer file trading. That's ...

Spanish lecturer fired for P2P lecture

Monday, May 23rd, 2005

Jorge Cortell, a lecturer at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) in Spain, has been fired for discussing the legal uses of P2P networks. Cortell was scheduled to give a public lecture, including a public use of P2P software, to demonstrate the socially valuable and (under Spanish law) fully legal ...

Looking sideways–at rigid copyright rules

Friday, May 20th, 2005

Discovering flickr.com; including obligatory link as legal duty. Picture is available under attribution, noncommercial, share-alike license, as described at CreativeCommons.org. Consider this notice that, in fact, so is the whole damned blog.

Is eBay enforcing bad-faith copyright claims?

Friday, May 20th, 2005

Here on Ed Foster's Gripelog, you'll find a story alleging that eBay is blindly enforcing the copyright allegations of NetEnforcers, a coin-operated IP enforcement shop. (What they call "comprehensive brand protection services.") This may be a private IP rent-a-cop going overboard to inflate its enforcement numbers, or it could also represent ...

Privacy? What privacy?

Thursday, May 19th, 2005

Here are two really creepy stories about how privacy is a) already a thing of the past, and b) in worse shape, if big movie studios have their way. First, here is a Times article (link dies in a week; see BugMeNot.com to view anonymously) about how Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) ...