Domain Name Rights Coalition

Richard Stallman: "The Future of Free Software ":


Richard Stallman gave the keynote speech at the Turin, Italy, meeting on March 18 about the drafting of GPLv3, "The Future of Free Software," and I thought you'd like to read it. You can also view a video of it, if you prefer at http://streaming.polito.it/TFOFS [Ogg]. The current draft of GPLv3 is here. He explains very clearly the more complex proposed changes, such as the clause on DRM ("Tivo-ization") and patents. I have to frankly tell you that the opening part about not using the phrase "intellectual property" seems to be at least in part about a conversation we had on using the phrase, because I maintained that if you are referring to the law, there is no confusion, that it's a term of art that has a specific meaning in the law. Lawyers know the difference between patent and copyright law, even if no one else does, and so when they use that term as an umbrella phrase, they know what they mean. Obviously he disagrees, for all the reasons he explains in this speech. I'm just fessin' up that he's responding, I think, to my position and basically saying I'm all wet. I realize he's likely had that conversation with many other people. But that doesn't inhibit me one bit from producing the whole speech, because for all I know he's right, and anyway, I don't have to agree with everything he ever says in every area to know it's worthwhile to listen. And when it comes to the GPL, there is no one better to tell us the purpose of the license and what is intended than the man who has the final say. He addresses that too, at the very end. His explanation of the purpose behind the proposed changes in the GPL is very useful, and I am sure it will clarify the draft license for you. He also tells what they decided *not* to try to do. So here is his speech, in full. The transcript is by Ciaran O'Riordan. If you click on the first link to the speech, you will find more links to further information.

Posted by mikki at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Royal Reading of the Reports:


The ICANN "Public" Forum begins, as usual, with the Royal Reading of the Reports and the announcement, as usual, that today's public forum must end early and tomorrow's public forum will begin late.

As you scroll through the list below, note the place of high importance that the Board has placed "open microphone."Here is this afternoon's agenda: President's

Report; Supporting

Organization & Advisory Committee Reports; ccNSO

Report; GNSO

Council Report; ALAC

(At-Large Advisory Committee) Report; Public

Comment on President's Report & Supporting Organization &

Advisory Committee Report; Nominating

Committee Report; Ombudsman

Report; Public

Comments on Nominating Committee & Ombudsman Reports; Break; Morocco

2006 Meeting Hosts; Brazil

2006 Meeting Hosts; Presentation

on President's Strategy Committee; Public

Comments on President's Strategy Committee & Open Microphone. 

Posted by mikki at 09:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ICANN Attempts to Transform The Internet Into The World's Most Heavily Regulated Industry (Almost): "

ICANN, a regulatory body that is supposed to ensure that the internet's domain name system answers queries, is instead trying to make the Internet as heavily regulated as the nuclear power industry. But instead of protecting safety or stability, ICANN seems intent of simply sucking as much cash out of the internet as possible, no matter how much that might damage innovation.

We already see how ICANN is extracting a tax and a tithe out of every part of the domain name industry, and we see how ICANN is imposing its social and economic policies onto the internet and its users.

Now there is word that ICANN is apparently looking at charging $250,000 (US) to apply for a top level domain.

That's about 10,000 times greater than my estimate of what they should be charging.

As I see it there is only one legitimate question that ICANN ought to ask: Whether the applicant is willing to commit to follow internet technical standards.

ICANN seems to be like a department of motor vehicles that doesn't ask applicants for drivers licenses whether they know how to drive, but instead asks the applicants to demonstrate that they have two Oxford educated chauffeurs for their Rolls Royce.

ICANN's directors only a few weeks ago had the hubris to saddle users of the internet with billions of dollars of added unnecessary fees to register names in .com.

And ICANN continues to avoid even the appearance of examining what service level requirements they ought to impose on root server operators. And the 300millisecond response time requirement placed on Verisign isn't even the the ghost of a shadow of the kind of real technical service requirements it ought to be considering.

Certainly at $250,000, plus yearly tithes, it becomes a real business question whether to bother to apply to ICANN or simply bring a legal action, or several legal actions in separate countries, asking whether ICANN has become not merely a combination in restraint of trade, but an illegal combination in restraint of trade.

Apparently ICANN is wandering around its Petit Trianon, utterly disconnected from reality. Perhaps it is time for users of the internet to find a tennis court.

(Via CaveBear Blog.)

Posted by mikki at 06:49 PM | Permalink

First Thoughts On ICANN's Wellington, NZ, Meeting:

ICANN has begun a meeting in Wellington, New Zealand.

Nice place New Zealand.  But remote.  Has anyone noticed how many
years it has been since ICANN has had a meeting in the place where it has its
legal home, California?  Perhaps ICANN is afraid.  And perhaps ICANN
should be afraid, very afraid - I've spoken to people in the California
government and they are aware of ICANN and its ill and exclusionary behavior
towards citizens.

As a prelude to the meeting both Ross Rader and Susan Crawford wrote
interesting notes on their blogs.  I'll take a moment and respond those
those.

Ross
suggested that ICANN's GNSO is not conflicted because it represents all
stakeholders.  I don't agree.  ICANN's GNSO, and ICANN generally,
exclude the largest group of internet stakeholders - the community of internet
users.  The interest of that group, measured in terms of the cumulative
financial impact and in the number of people affected, the "stake" of
this community far outweighs that of the members of the GNSO by several orders
of magnitude.

But it is a well accepted principle of nearly every legal system on the
planet that collections of incumbent business interests ought not to have the
life-and-death power over the attempts of others to enter the marketplace. 
The idea that incumbents can limit the entry of new players went out with the
Guild system.  Yet is that not what ICANN has become, a Guild, a place in
which incumbent businesses (and a few other selected industrial bystanders, such
as the intellectual property industry) have been given the power to be
gatekeepers who permit or deny new entrepreneurs, new ideas, and new products?

And is that not also "regulation" in its worst and most
heavy-handed sense?

Ross suggests that ICANN is not a regulator.  But if we examine the
aspects of domain name life upon which ICANN imposes mandatory conditions we see
that ICANN has established a deeply intrusive and deeply controlling system of
regulation.  Among the things that ICANN imposes are minimal registry
prices, astronomically high hurdles for new registry proposals to overcome,
terms and conditions in registry and registrar contracts and users who acquire
domain names, a dispute policy amounting to supra-national law of
trademark-over-domain-name, a WHOIS policy that requires registrars and
registries to publish their customer lists and that also is the largest and
worst privacy abuse on the internet.

If that's not regulation then I don't know what regulation is.

Susan
suggested that from the feedback she has received that there is pent-up
demand for perhaps a dozen or less new Top-Level-Domains.  I, and others,
tend to feel that that number understates the actual demand by at least several
thousand-fold.

An easy test would be for ICANN to put up on its website, in a place that
people can actually find on its website, a request for statements of interest in
obtaining a TLD.  That web page should make it clear that ICANN is asking
for those who would be interested under the following conditions:

• Minimal application fee ($25 US) and no yearly tithes to ICANN


• The only review will be to ask whether the applicant will abide by
  published internet technical standards.


• No requirement to adhere to existing ICANN contractual structures, publish
  customer lists (WHOIS), mandate a UDRP, or use a registry-registrar business
  model.

Yup, that's it - those three conditions.  The first condition should
cover ICANN's costs of checking the second condition and of mechanically adding
the TLD to the root zone file.  (ICANN could charge a reasonable yearly maintenance
fee - perhaps $100 - for updates to the name server records.)  The second
condition is really the only one necessary to protect the technical stability of
the internet - see the new ICANN/Verisign contract for one definition of what
"stability" means.  And the third condition is there to indicate
that the abusive behaviors of ICANN in the past should be discounted when making
these statements of interest.

Under those conditions I'd
put up my hand for my .ewe registry.

Now, back to the ICANN meeting itself.

Paul Twomey opened a hornet's nest of accumulated
anger when he suggested that his discussion be off the record.

Paul: ICANN's began its life in secrecy with secret agreements made by
ICANN's founder, Joe Sims.  The fact of those agreements is well known -
Sims once told me of their existence during a phone call when he told me that
changes in the yet-to-be-formed ICANN were impossible because such changes would
contravene those agreements.  Then very soon after ICANN formed certain
ICANN board members and officers adopted a stance right out of Orwell's Animal
Farm - that in order to be "open" ICANN's board had to meet in
secret.

Then ICANN went on through the years in that mode, secrecy piled on top of
secrecy, closed meetings on top of closed meetings.

And then I was elected to ICANN's Board of Directors.  ICANN felt that
it should operate in secret even against its own Board of Directors!  I
tried to exercise my "absolute right" under the Law to take a look at
ICANN's financials.  ICANN had the audacity to try to deny me that
right. 
I had to sue.  I won, ICANN lost.  You would think after the disastrous
advice that ICANN's law firm gave it on that occassion, that ICANN might
reconsider its choice of law firms.  When I left the board I recommended
(see Section 4.12 of Appendix B of http://www.cavebear.com/rw/senate-july-31-2003.htm)
that ICANN make a deep review and potentially significantly reform its
relationship with Jones-Day.)

Yet, apparently ICANN still does not easily open its books or its affairs to
directors.  And most of the directors have been wimps, not asking question
much less requiring answers, not demanding that staff do what staff ought to
do.  ICANN directors generally treat their jobs on the ICANN Board of
Directors as some sort of distant honorific in which the directors merely make
polite nudging noises rather than actually using their plenary power and
obligatory authority to actually direct
the affairs of ICANN by making informed and independent decisions.

In addition, apparently, ICANN
has not published any financial statements on its web pages for several years
- I wonder whether ICANN has made its mandatory filings of its IRS form 990, a
document that tax-exempt entities such as ICANN are required to make visible to
the public else be subject to a daily accumulating fine.

Stepping over to another topic - apparently TLD registries are trying to make
a land-grab by claiming that they have the exclusive rights to the
internationalized versions of their strings.  What an absurd idea. 
How greedy can these TLD registries get?  Haven't they ever read the Grimms'
tale of  The Fisherman
and His Wife?

Tell me this: What does "com" mean?  It is not a word in
English.  It has been used as shorthand for "communications" (as
in 3COM) or "commercial".  What is the internationalized version
of a non-word or acronym?

By-the-way, I own the domain name "cie.com" which, if viewed
in French could be construed to mean the same as "com.com".

Posted by mikki at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Creative Commons license upheld by court | CNET News.com:


A court in the Netherlands has ruled that a Creative Commons license is binding in a case brought against a Dutch gossip magazine by an ex-MTV star.

This is one of the first times that the license--which offers more flexibility than traditional copyright licenses--has been tested in a court of law, according to legal Web site Groklaw.

"The Creative Commons licenses are quite new, so there has been very little in the way of case law so far, so this is a significant development," Groklaw reported.

Posted by mikki at 07:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Right-wing think-tank hates DRM:


Cory Doctorow:

The Cato Institute, an ultra-libertarian, right-wing think tank, has released a white paper damning the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on breaking the anti-copying systems used to cripple digital media, like DVDs and iTunes songs.

It's amazing to watch crippleware come under attack from all points of the compass -- Marxists and anarchists hate DRM. Libertarians hate DRM. Media studies people, economists, and musicians hate DRM.

But it takes sharp free-market types like the Cato characters to bust out elegant critiques like this one:

The movie industry has every right to segment the worldwide market for DVDs, but it

should bear the costs of doing so. Those

costs might include requiring no-resale contracts with distributors and monitoring sales

in low-price countries to make sure DVDs

were not being resold outside their intended

market. Deciding whether those costs would

be worthwhile might be difficult. The indus-

try’s desire for market segmentation is not,

however, a good reason to outlaw the sale of

unofficial DVD players. The role of government is not to ensure that a private business’s

pricing strategy succeeds, and consumers,

who have not agreed to help enforce the DVD

cartel’s segmentation scheme, are under no

obligation to respect it.

I've heard for years that the Cato Institute was divided on DRM and copyright, so it's good to seem them taking a stand now. I think they've only scratched the surface, though. Of special interest to free-marketeers should be the way that DRM lets Apple hijack the music companies' copyright monopoly and turn it into a tax on Apple customers who switch from an iPod to a competing product. You can keep your MP3s if you switch from Windows to Mac, but if you switch from iPod to Creative, kiss your iTunes goodbye. Talk about anti-competitive!

And how about TiVo updating its devices to cripple them after their customers have already paid for them? Or Macrovision using its monopoly over DVD anti-analog tech to jack up its licensing prices to the movie industry? If you like free markets, DRM are a nightmare from top to bottom.

Link

(via Michael Geist)

Posted by mikki at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CIRA Suspends Participation in ICANN:


The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has issued a public letter to ICANN calling on the organization to follow accountable, transparent, and fair processes. Until the concerns are addressed, CIRA says it is suspending its voluntary contributions to ICANN... more...

Posted by mikki at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad ICANN:


Every once in a while, ICANN pushes so far past the limits of acceptable decision-making processes that the only suitable response becomes satire. Here are three recent examples:

• Texturbation -- which looks like a new weblog -- has two recent posts on the .COM deal:

  "VeriSign's .com Win Guarantees Internet Stability"

  and "VeriSign to Outsource .com Registry to Go Daddy";
  
  

• Karl Auerbach has simplified the creation of an ICANN Strategic Plan by automating the generation of important-sounding but nonsensical ICANN-speak; and,
  
  
• Richard Sexton takes on Vint Cerf and the ICANN Board Chair's views on new gTLDs.
  

Posted by mikki at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ICANN's Strategic Plan:

ICANN has issued its "draft"
Strategic Plan.

It is most interesting for what it does not say.

First of all, nowhere does it suggest that ICANN is striving to be
accountable to the community of internet users or to serve their needs. 
Instead it is full of words about how ICANN is going to serve its
"stakeholders", which by definition excludes internet users.

Did you notice that the ALAC or at-large isn't even mentioned?  I guess
that even ICANN has realized that the ALAC is a failure - institutional
cheer-leading Astroturf is hard to grow.

Nor does ICANN even begin to mention that it aspires to ensure that the upper
tiers of the internet's domain name system will operate 24x7x365, quickly and
accurately responding to query packets with response packets and doing so
without prejudice against any query source or mining of the data stream for
non-operational purposes.

I wonder whether a lot of the text for this plan came from Dilbert's
Mission Statement Generator?  (If you look quickly you may see an experimental
tool to generate ICANN Strategic Objectives.)

It's also nice to know that not only is ICANN planning on continuing its
excommunication of internet users, much less granting them the lofty position of
"stakeholder", but that ICANN is apparently canonizing and
transforming some of its current stakeholders into "key-stakeholders".

Posted by mikki at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ICANN's Registrar Community on the ropes: Can the cheese stand alone?:


Bret makes some great points about the Registrar community and its lack of involvement over the years with the more serious, and less profitable, issues that ICANN has been faced with since its inceptions.

You can draw a straight line between the ICANN Board's decision to abandon accountability and its decision to give Verisign a perpetual monopoly on .COM.
An ICANN that routinely disregards its obligation to open its Board meetings to public scrutiny, even to post timely minutes, is an ICANN that can never be trusted to make decisions in the public interest.

– icann.Blog

The same issues that are now biting the Registrar community square in the ass.

First they ghettoized Individual Users, and we did not speak out—
because we did not represent Individual Users;
Then they isolated and ridiculed the activist Board members and critics, and we did not speak out—
because we are not activist Board members or critics;
Then they dissolved the DNSO General Assembly, and we did not speak out—
because we did not participate in the DNSO General Assembly;
Then they antagonized the Country Code Managers, who resisted fairly well, but we still did not speak out—
because we were not Country Code Managers;
Now they are marginalizing the Registrar community —
…and few are left to speak with us.

…with apologies to Martin Niemöller.

Posted by mikki at 04:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's to the Crazy Ones....:


A group of registrars filed a new Request for Reconsideration this

week (PDF here). It addresses ICANN's many failures in openness, transparency,

legitimacy, and sound decision-making. It's well worth reading.

Registrars, it's also probably time you all got out of your work rooms

during the ICANN meetings and met some important people in the

community.

Allow me to make a few

introductions.

Registrars, I'd first like to

introduce you to the editors of ICANNWatch.... Michael

Froomkin, Jonathan Weinberg, Dave Farber, Ted Byfield, and Milton

Mueller. They started writing about the very issues raised in your

Reconsideration Request way back in 1999. Imagine that.

You also

should take a few minutes and get to know Karl Auerbach and Andy Müller-Maguhn.

They used to be on the Board. They were even elected.

Take some time to

talk about ICANN accountability with the many members of the NAIS Project and the At Large Study

Committee: Clement Dzidonu, Alan Levin, Izumi Aizu, Adam

Peake, Myungkoo Kang, Christian Ahlert, Stefaan Verhulst, Jeanette

Hofmann, Jerry Berman, Alan Davidson, Rob Courtney, Scott Harshbarger,

Don Simon, Raúl Echeberria, Carlos Afonso, Carl Bildt, Charles

Costello, Pierre Dandjinou, Esther Dyson, Olivier Iteanu, Ching-Yi Liu,

Oscar Robles, and Pindar Wong. Do you remember this statement in Ghana? Some of us will never forget it. We knew then what it would mean for this ICANN.

Take a virtual walk

through the former

DNSO's General Assembly, where disenfranchised individual

domain name registrants still worry about an unaccountable, opaque

ICANN.

Spend some time in Wellington getting to know

the At Large Advisory

Committee. They're the last vestiges of a once robust At Large Membership.

And last but not least, let me

introduce you to Ed

Hasbrouck. In spite of being bullied by ICANN's counsel and

ignored by ICANN's Board, Mr. Hasbrouck has filed timely and important

requests for reconsideration and independent

review. In them, he makes allegations about ICANN's closed, non-transparent processes that are strikingly similar to the

ones you made. You two have a lot of common

interests.

You need to know all of these

people, Registrars.

See,

here's how this works: we're all connected.

You can

draw a straight line between the ICANN Board's decision

to abandon accountability and its decision to give Verisign

a

perpetual monopoly on .COM.
An ICANN that routinely

disregards its obligation to open its Board meetings to public

scrutiny, even to post timely minutes, is an ICANN that can never be trusted to make decisions in the public interest.

After you meet all these people, Registrars, you'll

find that you like their company a great deal. It's these people -- the

users -- who share your interests in an open, competitive marketplace.

They too believe in a transparent, accountable ICANN. It's time you got to know these people, maybe even helped them organize into voting GNSO constituencies or funded their travel to ICANN's farflung meetings. And when you

meet them in some hotel bar in Wellington or Marrakech or Sao Paulo, buy them a drink and raise a

toast to

the crazy ones.

As you've now discovered, they weren't so crazy after all.

Posted by mikki at 06:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Internet Gambling, The ICANN Way: Using Someone Else's Wallet:

Bret Fausett's blog quoted Stratton Sclavos (CEO of Verisign) as saying that every week Verisign's registry gets
7,000,000 name registrations but that only 0.6% (42,000) of those last more than 5
days.

Wow!

In other words, for every "normal" registration transaction there are 167 five-day speculative registration transactions (plus an additional 167 drop transactions.)  Thus for every normal registration there are 333 speculative transactions (i.e. one normal add transaction and 167 5-day add/drop transaction pairs.)

And, it seems from what I've been able to discover so far, but I'd certainly like clarification, that Verisign receives revenue only for the "normal" registration transactions but has to eat the cost of the 5-day add/drop transaction pairs.

Which, if true, means that the registry fee charged for each normal registration transaction has to cover the cost of 333 speculative registry transactions.  That's a heavy and unjustifiable burden.

I have long assumed that the actual cost of registry operations is down in the 1 cent per year range.  I'm not alone in this belief.

We know that Verisign isn't losing money with the $6 registry fee.  And if we take into account the 1:333 ratio of normal-to-speculative registrations we see that the actual registry transaction fee has to be below $0.02, with the "normal" customer picking up the tab for 333 speculative transactions.

One of the reasons that Joe Sims, ICANN's architect-apparent of the ICANN-Verisign agreement, said in a posting at Circle-ID is that this new .com agreement was needed was to encourage Verisign to invest in infrastructure.

However, according to Sclavos statement, apparently the vast bulk of that infrastructure is there to support speculation rather than "normal" name registrations.

And that's not even counting the infrastructure that Verisign has to maintain to handle the stupid system of polling by registrars who circle like vultures waiting for names to drop.

In other words, those of us who consume domain names in the "normal" way, i.e. we use 'em for long terms, appear to be carrying an enormous burden (measured in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars per year in inflated registry fees) to support the ICANN allowed, if not ICANN created, speculative fever.

And yet, those of us who pay this tab get no vote in ICANN and simply get to pay the bill every year, year-in/year-out.

To the degree that my speculations (pun intended) are accurate, ICANN and its registry system are building up an enormous pool of money that one could claim has been dragged out of domain name buyers because ICANN is a combination in restraint of trade that can't be bypassed because ICANN occupies a monopoly position that is buttressed by a very shadowy governmental presence.

It is appalling to be reminded, once again, of how badly ICANN has damaged the internet.  Rather than creating a domain name system that is rich in competition and innovation we find, after over half a decade of ICANN blundering, that the domain name system marketplace is devoid of real competition except among registries and even there the only real difference is price.  Rather than low prices that reflect underlying economies of scale we see a system that grossly subsidizes speculators out of the pockets of normal internet users to the tune of several hundreds of millions of dollars every year.  Under ICANN's hand innovative domain name providers have been arbitrarily denied the right to go into business and those who do get ICANN's blessing are required to follow rules that subordinate user and business choice to the desires of ICANN's "stakeholders" and to pay large fees to support ICANN's ever growing bureaucracy.  And ICANN created FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) is used to besmirch those who suggest that ICANN's approach is as empty as the Emperor's fabled wardrobe.

Update: I've been wondering whether a decimal point has been slipped and that the real number is 6% rather then 0.6%.  That is more consistent with a steady-state of roughly 40 to 50 million names in .com.

But even if the number is 6% that still means that to 420,000 paying registrations are supporting the cost of 6,580,000 freeloading speculative transactions.  That's still an egregious subsidy being paid by normal domain name users.

Posted by mikki at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Open Rights Group wades into DRM debate - Security Strategy - Breaking Business and Technology News at silicon.com:


An MP's suggestion that the British Library moderate the debate over digital rights management (DRM) and copyright law has been welcomed by cyber rights campaigners.
Suw Charman, executive director of the Open Rights Group (ORG), said on Wednesday that the British Library would be "an excellent facilitator" of DRM debate.
She said: "There definitely needs to be a wider debate around DRM. Libraries understand copyright in great detail, and the British Library especially has a great deal of experience in the nuances of DRM and copyright law. It would be a fantastic facilitator of public debate."
The British Library seemed surprised at MP Derek Wyatt's suggestion on Tuesday that it lead the debate on DRM and present results to government but has indicated its willingness to "play a part".
Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, told the Westminster eForum on DRM: "The library will maintain a balanced view between extremes in debates on rights protection. A healthy creative economy needs an intellectual-property framework that rewards creativity."
Charman agreed with Wyatt's assertion that copyright often doesn't benefit the creator.

Posted by mikki at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Piracy is as Piracy Does:

Interesting note here
about how the MPAA is blaming piracy for 9% less revenues last year.
Why is it always piracy?
maybe Lucas is right;

maybe the era of the blockbuster is over.
If so, blaming the customers for demonstrating a market need for
something else delivered differently won't solve the motion picture
industry's malaise.

Me, I did go see Peter Jackson's blockbusters, but precious few others.
There are good Hollywood films out there.
I saw Crash twice: once on an airplane and once on a DVD I bought.
I never considered going to a movie theater to see it.
Why put up with talkative audience, overpriced drinks, and the possibility
of being arrested for carrying a cell phone that can record movies?

The Internet is not the problem with movies. The big risk the motion picture industry is facing is in sticking too long with a business model that is outdated.

-jsq

Posted by mikki at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CDT Endorses Bill to Protect Political Speech Online:


CDT is urging Congress to pass a bill that would protect the rights of online political speakers, without creating large new loopholes in campaign finance law. Introduced by Reps. Charles Bass (R-N.H.) and Tom Allen (D-Maine), H.R. 4900 exempts the vast majority of bloggers and other individual Internet speakers from burdensome reporting requirements. In an opinion piece published in Roll Call, CDT argues that 4900 -- which was based on a CDT proposal -- is more complete than a competing measure addressing the same issue. The House is expected to take up the issue this week.

Posted by mikki at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Judging the judge's Google leanings | News.blog | CNET News.com:


A federal judge this week granted a partial victory to the federal government in its quest to get Google to turn over search results.

U.S. District Judge James Ware said he would likely give the Justice Department access to a portion of Google's index of Web sites, but not to its users' search terms. The Justice Department is looking for the data to help it back its case in a pending trial over an antipornography law.

Google had resisted the subpoena for search data (unlike some of its competitors), saying that the data would not be relevant and that the request would put consumers' privacy at risk.

The case afforded the blogosphere plenty of opportunity for outrage: People were angry with the government, with Google and with the judge.

Posted by mikki at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What Right in Digital Actors?:

A Copyfight reader pointed me to a Slate story on digital thespians. Epstein talks about two kinds of digital creations: wholly new 'synthespians' as well as digitized representations of actual actors (Tom Hanks for Polar Express; Sean Connery for the From Russia with Love game). Although the technical hurdles to such captures remain quite large - especially if your goal is true-to-life, fool-an-audience reproduction - the reader's question was different.

To wit: what rights do you purchase/license/contract for in creating such a reproduction of a real person? Rights to the "likeness?" Performance rights? Do either of these cover things the actor never physically did or said? Is there an exclusivity clause? There are clearly some issues around the ownership of a character, if that character has appeared before (e.g. Connery's Bond) but usually the character rights reside with the studio. But if you want the Connery Bond instead of a generic James Bond you also have to incude Connery in the deal, as well as whatever studio or estate has the Bond character rights.

IANAL, but I'm hoping some of my readers are or can point me to resources from people who've actually worked in this area.

Posted by mikki at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speaking of Domain Names and Security...:


No sooner had we finished the PC Forum panel on security issues, which included a segment on the DNS, than I found this thread on NANOG on the same subject. Worth reading.

Posted by mikki at 05:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

MPAA vs Usenet:


Following its strategy of smashing torrent-linking sites, the MPAA has filed suits against three companies that provide searches for Usenet content including illegally copied movie files. All three of the current targets have the air of shadiness about them, being essentially anonymous registered shells. However, as Bray points out in his Boston Globe story, success here will likely embolden the Cartel to tackle more well-known Usenet index sites like Newzbin.com and Nfonews.com. And sitting at the far end of that road is Google, which owns a huge database of old Usenet postings and whose index likely contains more than a few files the MPAA wouldn't approve of.

Posted by mikki at 05:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Proposed New Jersey Laws Would Chill Free Speech:

EFF and Other Groups Call for Bills' Withdrawal

San Francisco - A diverse coalition of companies, public interest organizations, and legal scholars, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), craigslist, Public Citizen, the US Internet Industry Association (USIIA), the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and Professors Lyrissa C. Barnett Lidsky and Jennifer M. Urban, sent an open letter today to three New Jersey assemblymen, urging them to withdraw their support from two bills designed to eliminate anonymous online speech.

Assembly bills A1327 and A2623 would require Internet service providers to record users' identities and reveal them in any claim of defamation. While aimed at curbing online bad actors, the bills instead run afoul of the First Amendment—which protects the right to speak anonymously—as well as a federal law designed to protect speech in online fora. The bills would require identification of an online poster before the facts were resolved, leading to a flood of unsubstantiated claims designed simply to unmask online speakers.

"Protecting anonymity is vital to maintaining the diversity of viewpoints on the Internet," said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. "Keeping online debates robust enables democracy, even if it allows name-calling and strongly worded opinions about political figures."

The open letter calls for Assemblymen Peter J. Biodi, Wilfredo Caraballo, and Upendra J. Chivukula not to waste taxpayer resources in defending these bills that will inevitably be struck down in court. New Jersey courts are already handling claims of defamation online in a careful and constitutionally appropriate manner, balancing a speaker's anonymity rights with the merits of the plaintiff's claim. The well-established standard in New Jersey and elsewhere for deciding whether to order the identification of anonymous defendants has functioned well to separate ill-founded lawsuits from cases in which identification is appropriate.

As evidence of this balanced approach, the open letter points to the cases available for review on a web site maintained by the Cyberslapp Coalition—several of whose members signed the open letter—at www.cyberslapp.org. The Cyberslapp web site provides briefs, evidence, and opinions from nearly four dozen "John Doe" cases in which the standard has been discussed and applied. The site, which permits search both by keyword and by state of decision, is provided free of charge as a resource for litigants on both sides of Doe disputes.

For the full text of the open letter:
http://eff.org/Privacy/Anonymity/NewJerseyLetter.pdf

The Cyberslapp Coalition:
http://www.cyberslapp.org

Contact:

Kurt Opsahl
Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
kurt@eff.org

Posted by mikki at 02:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

BBC NEWS | Technology | Google set for court in data spat:


Google is to take on the US government in court on Tuesday as the internet search engine fights demands to hand over records and lists of data.
The Justice Department wants Google to provide a week's worth of search records, saying it needs the data to help it better police cyberspace.

But Google complains that complying with the request would compromise its business and the privacy of its users.

Similar requests were made of other net firms such as Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL.

Posted by mikki at 02:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Answers from Vint Cerf: The Road Ahead for Top-Level Domains:


Earlier this year we requested your questions on one of ICANN's most heated discussions -- issues involving top-level domains (TLDs) -- which we passed on to Vint Cerft, Google's VP and Chief Internet Evangelist and chairman of the board of ICANN. Despite an understandably heavy schedule, Vint Cerf has taken the time to personally respond to more questions than we had originally anticipated. So with a special thanks, here are his responses. more...

Posted by mikki at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

trying to get this blog recognized by Technorati despite this Technorati Profile. We're getting to think they just don't love us.

Posted by mikki at 05:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Pope Benedict to Receive Nasty Letter from RIAA?:

File this under "funny for now" but given the RIAA's latest flip-flop on the legality of ripping your own CDs, maybe not funny for long.

A Copyfight reader pointed me to the Canonist blog, on which we read a report of Pope Benedict XVI being given a gift of a pre-loaded iPod, containing "a sampling of the radio’s programming in English, Italian and German and musical compositions." As the blogger notes, it's unlikely that these tracks were individually paid for, as the RIAA would have us do. We can barely wait until the Cartel's jihad reaches the Holy See.

Posted by mikki at 04:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Editorial: New Jersey Assemblyman Wants to End Online Anonymity:


New Jersey Assemblyman Peter J. Biondi has proposed a pile of
unconstitutional filth that would end online forum anonymity...

Every court that has addressed the issue has held that
individual internet subscribers have a right to engage in
anonymous internet speech.

-- US District Court Judge Victor Marrero, ACLU vs Ashcroft

Not to be deterred by precedent or the fact...

Posted by mikki at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

E-mail delivery 'tax' criticised:


Non-profit groups protest about plans to charge up to one US cent to deliver e-mail to supporters.

Posted by mikki at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chinese Net Routes Around Political Stonewalling:


According to this BBC story,
the Chinse government got tired of waiting for ICANN to approve top level domains in non-Roman characters
and rolled their own for use in China, using a combination of client-side software, domain name translation by ISPs, and other hacks to make it work.

With 110 million people online, China is already the second largest net-using nation on Earth.

Big push for Chinese net domains,
By Mark Ward,
Technology Correspondent, BBC News website

So the legendary recalcitrance of ICANN to move ahead with top level domains
has led to the world's largest country going ahead anyway, in order to promote their domestic economy.

Chinese domain names will no doubt occasionally leak out of China, e.g., on business cards
and in signatures of electronic mail messages, leading to confusion.
But that's a relatively small risk compared to a major nation being impeded in its use of the Internet.
If you see domain names ending in
.zhongguo, .gongsi, or .wangluo in Chinese characters, you're probably seeing such a leak.
(I take the first of these names to be the Chinese name for China; can someone tell me what the other two are?)
Note that .zhongguo.cn, .gongsi.cn, and .wangluo.cn already exist under the .CN top level domain,
so if you see those, you're not seeing a leak.

Commercial companies may want to consider that if they don't deliver what the customers want,
somebody else probably will, and on the Internet the somebody else may be in a different company
in a different legal regime that won't be impressed by patent thickets or trademarks.

-jsq

Posted by mikki at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ICANN Capitulates:

In the face of nearly unanimous opposition from the ICANN "constituencies," the ICANN Board has approved settlement with VeriSign. VeriSign (which had sued ICANN when ICANN forced it to shutter the SiteFinder disservice), learns that lawsuits lead to better contracts (quasi-perpetual hold on .com, complete with datamining and price raises); the domain name registrars and other ICANN participants learn that cooperative behavior is less productive than lawsuits; and the rest of us learn that unless we can foot the bill for lawyers of our own, our voice in the ICANN "policy development process" is meaningless. My tremendous respect for the directors who voted against the settlement.

Posted by mikki at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A Day Which Will Live in Infamy: ICANN Board Approves VeriSign Settlement:


ICANN's Board voted to accept the latest settlement proposal by a vote of 9 to 5: "Today, ICANN's Board of Directors approved, by a majority vote, a set of agreements settling a long time dispute between ICANN and VeriSign, the registry operator for the .COM registry. These settlement documents include a new registry agreement relating to the operation of the .COM registry..." more...

Posted by mikki at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cornell University harasses maker of Cornell blog:


Cory Doctorow:

Elliott Back's personal site about Cornell University has attracted a nastygram from the university, which argues that it's possible that someone (presumably someone very foolish) might mistake his site (whose URL is cornell.elliottback.com) with Cornell University's site.

Some trademark holders are confused to the point of ridiculousness on what TM does and doesn't protect. Trademark lets you sue people who use your mark in commerce in a way that's likely to confuse the public about the origin of goods and services. It isn't enough that Pepsi calls itself a "cola" when Coke invented and trademarked the word -- Coke has to prove that people who buy Pepsi Cola sometimes think they're buying Coca-Cola.

Elliott's site won't confuse anyone. It is, instead, a fan site about Cornell University, spreading goodwill about the institution. Priceless, genuine goodwill. They've squandered this goodwill and wasted the time of their expensive lawyers who have better things to do (or, if they don't, are a waste of money and should be laid off and their budget reallocated to teaching and research) because of the remote, infinitesimal chance that somehow, cornell.elliottback.com will be mistaken for Cornell University.

Chilling Effects gathers, publishes and analyzes letters that threaten web-writers with legal action in retaliation for free expression. I hope Elliott stands his ground and sends a copy of this notice to them.

I am writing to request that you remove the name Cornell University from the name of your blog and website at cornell.elliottback.com. While we appreciate your hosting a forum in which Cornell news and events can be discussed, your use of the words Cornell University on the blog is confusing and can easily be misinterpreted to mean that the blog is maintained and/or sanctioned by the university. In fact, neither is the case.

Cornell University is a trademarked name and can only be used with the permission of the university. More specifically your use of the Cornell University name in this manner is unauthorized, misleading, and in violation of Section 397 of the General Business Law of the State of New York.

Posted by mikki at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)