shouting loudly

The US Copyright Office has delayed its ruling in the triennial rulemaking to determine exemptions to the DMCA’s ban on circumventing technological protection measures, instead extending the current set of exemptions for the near future. The Copyright Office website provides no reason for the delay. All we know now is that the Register of Copyrights [...]

Rebecca MacKinnon reports about possible U.S. Military censorship, and warns us for the slippery slope we have started. A couple of thousand years ago, the Chinese built the Great Wall to keep the hordes of barbarians out. Fast forward to now: the Chinese have been building the Great Firewall to keep ‘unhealthy’ information out. What [...]

The TVUPlayer uses P2P technology to facilitate streaming TV at high quality. HBO executives are obviously unhappy. No surprise that users, however, do like it–and their numbers are growing. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out internationally. China isn’t exactly known for the strictest of copyright enforcement, but it would be pretty [...]

MPAA chief Dan Glickman is proudly trumpeting his newest accomplishment: working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles to create a new merit badge in respecting copyright. “Working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles, we have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why they are valuable, and [...]

Okay, so this is really old news, but Lok just pointed it out and I feel compelled to share in case it’s news to anyone else. Do a Google search for Kazaa. At the bottom of the page, you’ll find: In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we [...]

Music companies and others who have a product to sell (e.g., Coke) are using P2P as a marketing tool. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Jay-Z (who provided the material for half of the Grey Album and never thought of suing; btw, read this letter) is using peer-to-peer traffic to promote his tour and [...]

As Professor Milton Mueller documented in his book Ruling the Root, US-based governance of internet naming is a politically touchy issue. Internet servers communicate without centralized control, with one exception: everyone needs an address. The root server, which controls internet addresses, “is the only point of centralized control in what is otherwise a distributed and [...]

Three years ago, Friendster was the social networking site. Google offered founder Jonathan Abrams $30m. Now, MySpace gets 50 times as many hits. What happened in the intervening years? This CNet article has a number of partial answers, but one theme sticks out: distracted by a litany of pie-in-the-sky dreams, they didn’t get the technical [...]

In response to European and South Korean antitrust concerns, Microsoft has made several changes to its forthcoming operating system. The new OS, Vista, will now feature less lock-in for its search, file formatting, and security features, the company has announced. So far, security firms are skeptical; the company has promised but not yet produced the [...]

The FCC has decided to allow experimenation in the highly desirable portion of spectrum that currently carries over-the-air TV. The spectrum, which falls below 900 megahertz, is generally viewed as the Park Avenue of the airwaves. It carries transmissions through walls and other obstructions much more easily than the slices of spectrum that are currently [...]