shouting loudly

The International Herald Tribune did a decent piece on WSIS negotiations. As Lokman noted, the US negotiators arent’ making any new friends. I’m glad to see that the NY Times carried this piece this morning. This has all been predicted by an Annenberg-UPenn alum: Milton Mueller. His book Ruling the Root discusses the very political [...]

I know this is a big shock, but the AP published a misleading story. Sadly, it’s been printed by (among others) the Washington Post, Seattle Post Intelligencer, and SF Chronicle. In it, Jennifer Kerr blares: The overriding answer from the two panels representing the recording industry, copyright experts and entrepreneurs was “no [new legislation needed]“–at [...]

Kieran McCarthy reports about the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) held in Geneva. This is the third meeting; the first meeting was in Geneva, the second in Tunis. The main argument, McCarthy reports, right now is about who will “rule” the internet. According to the report, the US currently controls the internet, by [...]

Hi: long awaited introduction. My name is Lokman, colleague of both Jason and Bill. My interests mainly concern issues of censorship, flow of information, technology, globalization, transnationalism, and comparative studies. My personal blog is called silent dreams; I also have a more professional website, with links to my papers and publications. Look forward to contributing [...]

Go here RIGHT NOW and learn about the eeeeevil broadcasting treaty that’s in work at the World Intellectual Property Organization. By my (non-lawyer) reading, it would give broadcasters copyright-like control over what they broadcast, whether it’s public domain, creative commons, or uncopyrightable material when it hits the air. Follow the links for more detail. The [...]

What was meant to be a quick glance at a few news sites has turned into a CNN-enabled blogging spree: An apparent “glitch” reveals that TiVo apparently offers broadcasters the ability to delete content that users have saved. This is on top of the the copyright protection announced last year for pay-per-view content. I can [...]

According to The Register (UK), WinMX and eDonkey are both offline… for now. I suspect this is largely the result of recent RIAA sabre-rattling. Why do I have a feeling this is going to push P2P users in the direction of open-source programs?

On Tuesday, the National Security Agency secured patent #6,947,978 for a method of identifying an internet user’s physical location based on IP address. It works by triangulating the target in relation to known IP addresses–comparing the delay between the target’s transmission and its passage through known geographic anchors. Sounds simple, huh? Geo-location is not news, [...]

Today, Arlen Specter has accused the Pentagon of stonewalling the inquiry to determine what military intel knew about four of the accused 9/11 hijackers. The method for having acquired this knowledge? Data mining. It was part of a now-defunct program known as “Able Danger.” The data is out there. Noodling around in it is, by [...]

This week, Steve Jobs has repeated his public warning to the major music labels: don’t raise the price of downloads. He says they’re “getting greedy” and behaving irrationally if they think that higher prices will seem reasonable when free music is still just a click away. The RIAA has convinced itself (and a good portion [...]