When Congress deep-sixed the Total Information Awareness program for fear it would compromise individual privacy, the government simply moved its research to various intelligence offices. [Wired News]
Also found on Wendy's Blog. There isn't much more to be said. Listen to the MP3
Here's an MP3 of yesterday's fantastic oral argument in MGM v. Grokster, before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. It's public domain, so share freely on the peer-to-peer networks whose legality Fred von Lohmann and Mike Page eloquently defend.
[Wendy: The Blog]This piece from Circleid.com could become very important in the future of Internet governance.
I just wanted to call people's attention to this International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) paper on Internet governance. I don't endorse it; haven't actually read it yet, but their say will play a big role and should be widely known: "Coming barely a month after the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva, and prepared by ICC's Commmission on E-Business, IT and Telecoms, the paper divides the issue of Internet governance into three main components - technical... [CircleID]
Yet another airline breaching passenger privacy, using personal information for purposes NOT disclosed. Once again we come to the obvious conclusion that a property right in personal information should belong to the INDIVIDUAL, not to the collector!
Northwest Airlines provided information on millions of passengers for a secret U.S. government air-security project soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, raising more concerns among some privacy advocates about the airlines' use of confidential customer data. [Washington Post: Front Page]
Take a look at THIS story. How could the USPTO be lame enough to grant a patent like this? What's next?
Two Web entrepreneurs accuse Network Solutions and Register.com of selling e-mail addresses and URLs that infringe on their naming method patent. [CNET News.com]
Despite stiff resistance from airlines and privacy advocates, the U.S. government plans to push ahead this year with a vast computerized system to probe the backgrounds of all passengers boarding flights in the United States. [Washington Post: Front Page]
In a ruling that is a victory for fair use rights, Jon Johansen has been cleared by a Norwegian court
From IP Justice
(Oslo) A Norwegian appeals court today cleared Jon Johansen of all charges for viewing his lawfully purchased DVDs on a DVD player that is not approved by the Hollywood movie studios.
The Norwegian appeals court upheld a January 2003 ruling from an Oslo City Court acquitting Johansen on all counts and rejecting the prosecutor’s theory that Johansen was guilty of violating Norwegian Criminal Code Section 145.2, which outlaws breaking into digital data that one has no right to access. Because Johansen accessed his own DVD and did not commit any copyright infringement the city court found Johansen innocent on all counts.
The penalty for breaking this Norwegian law is two years in prison if convicted. Johansen’s case marked the first time this law was used to prosecute someone for accessing his own property.
Johansen was first charged by the Norwegian Economic Crime Unit (OKOKRIM) at the request of the Motion Picture Association in 2000. After the Oslo City Court acquitted Johansen in January 2003, Hollywood pressured Norwegian prosecutors to appeal the decision and the retrial was scheduled to begin on December 2nd and wrapped on the 11th. Prosecutors may appeal this ruling to the Norwegian Supreme Court.
"It is delightful to see the Norwegian courts stand up to Hollywood and defend the rights of its citizens to engage in lawful, but unauthorized, uses of DVD movies," said IP Justice Executive Director Robin D. Gross. "Both the Norwegian city and appeals courts have wisely recognized that when you buy a DVD, you own it; and Hollywood does not have the right to tell you how you may use your property," explained the intellectual property attorney based in San Francisco.
Johansen was represented on appeal by Halvor Manshaus from the Oslo law firm Advokatfirmaet Schjødt, who also defended Johansen at the lower court.
"The ruling draws up the line of demarcation between the interests of owners and distributors of intellectual property on the one side, and consumers on the other," stated Manshaus. "The court mentions that optical storage media easily can be damaged, making it important for consumers to have the option of making a back-up copy within already defined "fair-use" terms. In addition, the Court states that although DeCSS can be used to make illegal copies, this was not the intent of Johansen, nor has he made copies in violation of intellectual property regulations," Manshaus added.
At 15, Johansen helped to create DeCSS, a computer program that unlocks DVDs in 1999 and first published on the Internet. DeCSS was written as part of an effort to build a DVD player for the Linux operating system and set off a fire-storm of Hollywood lawsuits to ban the software’s publication in 1999 and 2000.
Microsoft couldn't get what it wanted under US law, so it forum shopped around the world until it could find a court that would finally give it a preliminary injunction, barring rival Lindows from using the name.
Read more from InfoWorld.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments over whether the government is automatically on the hook for illegally releasing private data. The feds say individuals must prove harm before claiming compensation. By Ryan Singel. [Wired News]
Two months after the airline admitted coughing up passenger records to a defense contractor, the Army finally says it's investigating the matter. By Ryan Singel. [Wired News]
Michael Geist - outspoken Canadian Law Professor offers a unique perspective on fairness, Internet freedom, and how Canadians view "DMCA Gone Wrong." Well worth the read.
Are Canada's file swappers next in line to be prosecuted? The University of Ottawa Internet expert Michael Geist tells CNET News.com what to expect.
Is Canada a freer country when it comes to the Internet, as a result?
Based on an innovation perspective, we haven't run into the same problems the United States has, with lawsuits brought against researchers, garage door manufacturers and printing companies. Most Canadians look at those cases and are rather puzzled. [CNET News.com]
The Senate has passed S.877 the Anti-Spam bill introduced by Senator Conrad Burns (R-MT) and Ron Wyden (D-OR). The main provisions of the bill provide the Federal Trade Commission, attorneys general and Internet Service Providers more tools to go after commercial mailers who deliberately conceal the routing information of their messages. Several amendments where added to the bill at the last minute including a provisions to: encourage bounty hunters to track down spammers; create a do-not-spam list to be run by the FTC; and a labeling requirement for pornographic messages. October 23, 2003 [Center for Democracy and Technology]
We're very sorry to do this, but due to "spam comments" (comments with no content but contain links to generally pornographic sites) we must shut down the ability to comment to stories in our weblog.
If you have comments to individual articles, please submit them to admin at netpolicy dot com and we will post them if they are not spam, or post to the forums. Thank you for understanding.
An interesting article on one perspective on why names and numbers are important to the Internet
An article based on the most recent study for the European Commission on the Policy Implications of Convergence in the Field of Naming, Numbering and Addressing written by Joe McNamee and Tiina Satuli of Political Intelligence.
"With relation to the Internet and also IP addresses, the "scarcity" is more complicated: there are not only intellectual property issues with regards to domain names, but there is also an issue of managing the integrity of the system. For any naming... [CircleID]
CDT's information is well worth looking at.
CDT urged members of the House Commerce Committee to support balanced spam legislation containing an anti-spoofing provision and opt-out, but warned that a labeling provision in the current draft was probably unconstitutional. CDT called for the addition of a private right of action and recommended that states be preempted from regulating spam only for a few years, to see if the federal law was having an impact. Anti-spam bills have been stalled in both houses of Congress. A controversial proposal for a Do-Not-Spam List is the stumbling block in the Senate. October 16, 2003 [Center for Democracy and Technology]
Federal prosecutors ask an appeals court to reverse a computer-crime conviction that punished a California man for notifying a company's customers of a flaw in its e-mail service.
Filed on Tuesday in San Francisco's Ninth District Court of Appeals, the unusual request conceded that federal prosecutors in Los Angeles erred in bringing a criminal case against, and obtaining the conviction of, 30-year-old Bret McDanel. The one-time system administrator has already served his 16-month sentence and is currently on supervised release, during which time his access to computers is curtailed.
The conviction stems from an incident in September 2000, when McDanel notified the customers of his former employer--Tornado Development, which has since closed its doors--that the company's Web-based e-mail system had a flaw that could allow an attacker to gain access to a user's e-mail. The prosecutors successfully argued that that act--and the 5,600 e-mails sent to customers--had essentially damaged Tornado's system.
The Center for Democracy and Technology has spearheaded an excellent effort that should be supported by freedom loving citizens.
Three Republican Senators and four Democrats last week proposed legislation to add procedural safeguards to some of the most far-reaching sections of the PATRIOT Act. The SAFE Act, S. 1709, is spearheaded by Senators Craig (R-ID) and Durbin (D-IL). It covers sneak & peek searches (secret searches of homes and offices in ordinary criminal cases) and the PATRIOT Act provision granting broad access to sensitive personal information in the hands of businesses. It also specifies limits on roving wiretaps and would "sunset" some additional provisions of the PATRIOT Act at the end 2005. October 15, 2003 [Center for Democracy and Technology]
It is heartening to know that the Internet still "routes around breakage" in this manner
During the 2+ weeks for which Site Finder was operational, a number of ISPs took steps to disable the service. A study just released reveals details and analysis, including specific networks disabling Site Finder during its operational period. For example, China blocked the traffic at its backbone, and Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom and Korea's DACOM also disabled the service. US ISPs seem to have been slower to act, in general -- but US ISP Adelphia disabled the service September 20-22... [CircleID]
From Dan Gilmor's eJournal
The Internet has become a grossly commercialized Wild West in so many ways. But the community spirit on which it was founded is alive and well. The Net depends on the same spirit that motivates volunteers in the physical world: a commitment to solve problems and make life better for those who might otherwise not have the resources or expertise. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
It seems that our T1 line into DNRC headquarters has decided it is time to give up the ghost after over 10 years of service. The doomed cable is scheduled to be replaced "sometime soon." We are now back up for the foreseeable future, and are hoping that the replacement is sooner, rather than later, and goes smoothly.
From Karl Auerbach
Several times over the last few years I have referred to a formulation that I call "The First Law of the Internet".
I believe that this First Law represents the proper balance between public and private effects of internet activity. This First Law is in need of significant refinement, but is there anyone out there who believes that this First Law does not point the proper direction? If so, I encourage the articulation of that view.
Given the recent private acts on the net by Verisign, acts that have a broad public impact, I believe that it is worthwhile to visit the most basic questions regarding what the internet is and how we accommodate competing and conflicting uses.
The First Law of the Internet
Every person shall be free to
use the Internet in any way that is privately beneficial without being publicly
detrimental.
The burden of demonstrating
public detriment shall be on those who wish to prevent the private use.
Such a demonstration shall
require clear and convincing evidence of public detriment.
The public detriment must be of
such degree and extent as to justify the suppression of the private activity.
Power to DNRC Headquarters was restored yesterday at approximately 3pm. A big Thank You to Dominion Virginia Power. May everyone else come back online quickly as well.
You may have noticed that the DNRC website has been up and down quite a bit over the past four days. Hurricane Isabel has knocked out power to DNRC headquarters, and our only power is a small generator that we can only keep on intermittently. The Dominion Power crews are in the area, and we are hopeful to have power soon. Please excuse our absence.
Yet another country beats the US to spam legislation.
Spammers could incur up to $733,000 in penalties per day for sending junk e-mail--and one lawmaker calls on the United States to follow suit with similar legislation. [CNET News.com]
The UK has made spam a criminal offence to try to stop the flood of unsolicited messages. [BBC News | TECHNOLOGY]
And the plot thickens. Check this out from CircleID
----------
Here's another interesting angle on the Verisign Site Finder Web site. VeriSign has hired a company called Omniture to snoop on people who make domain name typos. I found this Omniture Web bug on a VeriSign Site Finder Web page... [CircleID]
EPIC, CDT and other privacy groups filed a "friend of the court" brief in the US Supreme Court arguing that the federal Privacy Act authorizes citizens to collect minimum monetary awards when the government has breached their privacy, without having to quantify their damages. The brief argues that this concept of liquidated damages is crucial to the enforcement regimes of many federal privacy laws. The case, involving improper disclosure of Social Security Numbers, will be decided later this year or next year. August 25, 2003 [Center for Democracy and Technology]
A Presidential Commission on the Postal Service released a report calling on the US Postal Service (USPS) to aggressively "explore the use of sender identification for every piece of mail, commercial and retail." CDT believes that intelligent mail can offer substantial benefits to mailers, especially in the commercial context, but the Commission ignored privacy concerns and the Constitutional right of anonymous political speech. August 21, 2003 [Center for Democracy and Technology]
Intellectual Property
Global Group's Shift On 'Open Source' Meeting Spurs Stir
by William New
A request for a meeting on open development issues has plunged the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) into a Washington political battle, causing it to shift its position on the issue.
At issue is whether WIPO should hold a meeting next year on "open and collaborative projects" such as "open source" software, which allows users to view and modify underlying code.
August 19, 2003. Technology Daily PM Edition
The meeting was proposed in a July 7 letter sent to WIPO Director General Kamil Idris by 68 distinguished scientists, academics, technologists, open-source advocates, consumer advocates, librarians, industry representatives and economists worldwide.
(http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/kamil-idris-7july2003.pdf)
Although the letter cited a broad range of open collaborative projects such as the World Wide Web and the Human Genome Project, the fight has focused on open-source software and on one signer of the letter -- James Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology, who has actively pushed for the meeting.
WIPO's initial response to the idea was so favorable that proponents began planning for a meeting. After receiving the letter, Francis Gurry, WIPO's assistant director and legal counsel, e-mailed a statement to a Nature magazine reporter calling such open development models "a very important and interesting development."
"The director general of WIPO looks forward with enthusiasm to taking up the invitation to organize a conference to explore the scope and application of these models as vehicles for encouraging innovation," he wrote.
But a few weeks later, WIPO backed off the idea. Gurry said he and other WIPO officials received "many calls" from consumer groups, trade associations, professional associations and representatives from governments.
"What happened in the intervening weeks is that a request for an open discussion on a range of 'projects' became transformed into an increasingly domestically, as opposed to internationally, oriented, polarized political and trade debate about one only of those 'projects', namely open-source software," Gurry told National Journal's Technology Daily on Tuesday. "In those circumstances, the possibility of conducting a policy discussion on intellectual property of the sort that might be appropriate for an international organization devoted to intellectual property became increasingly remote."
U.S. government officials have argued that WIPO is an inappropriate place for such a meeting.
One developing country representative to WIPO on Monday expressed disappointment at hearing that the meeting is in doubt, and Love and representatives from the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) were furious to learn of the shift. Love last week called the decision a "temporary setback," and vowed, "We're going to make this happen." But for meeting opponents, he said, it would be "as if you made an atheist pope for the day."
CCIA President Ed Black said on Tuesday: "Does this indicate that WIPO is abdicating authority and responsibility for these issues, including open source for the future? If so, we will all live by that, but then so must they. They should step up the plate or step aside. ... It is inexplicable that they would shut the door on what are clearly important issues."
Intellectual Property
U.S. Official Opposes 'Open Source' Talks At WIPO
by William New
An international intellectual property body is not the place for discussions about "open source" software, which allows users to view and modify the underlying code, because it falls outside of the organization's mission, a senior U.S. official argued on Monday.
Reviewing the original mission of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), said Lois Boland, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) acting director of international relations, it is "clearly limited to the protection of intellectual property. To have a meeting whose primary objective is to waive or remove those protections seems to go against the mission."
Boland was referring to a July request by a group of scientists, academics, open-source advocates and others for a meeting at WIPO on "open and collaborative projects," including open-source software. The WIPO secretariat initially replied favorably to the idea.
In a telephone interview, Boland gave several reasons why the Geneva-based WIPO should not hold the meeting, including a tight budget and late scheduling. She also said WIPO's agenda should be driven by member nations, and the idea came from outside the organization.
Officials from the 179 WIPO nations will convene in late September to decide their agenda for the next two years; the agenda has been in the works for months and does not include open-development issues. "It would have been somewhat unusual for such a meeting to materialize out of nothing," Boland said.
In the past six months, WIPO has had to cancel several meetings on topics directly relevant to the organization due to budgetary issues, she said, adding that with those problems, the organization should not "go out on a limb and express receptivity" to an open-development meeting.
U.S. government officials have had "informal" communications with WIPO,
Boland said. A WIPO official said that since receiving a wide range of communications, WIPO has stepped back from the idea of a meeting but has not fully rejected the possibility of addressing the topic.
The U.S. government has an interagency process for developing formal positions at WIPO. A meeting that included officials from PTO and the Copyright Office was held last Thursday at the State Department. The Commerce Department and Office of the U.S. Trade Representative are part of the interagency process, too.
Boland said the United States "would certainly have some rather bureaucratic objections" to WIPO considering a policy on open-source software. "There are technical and legalistic arguments to that." Open-source software is not protected under copyright law but only contract law, which is not the domain of WIPO, she said. That point has been heavily disputed by copyright experts.
Boland suggested that the U.S. government supports open-source growth as a development tool and she proposed it for consideration by a U.N. body focused on development.
She also reprimanded WIPO officials for publicly giving the impression that the body might consider open-source issues. "We think people working within the organization need to be better stewards of interactions" with nonprofit groups and other non-member organizations, she said.
There are indications that the internet, at least the internet as we know it today, is dying. I am always amazed, and appalled, when I fire up a packet monitor and watch the continuous flow of useless junk that arrives at at my demarcation routers' interfaces. That background traffic has increased to the point where it makes noticeable lines on my MRTG graphs. And I have little reason for optimism that this increase will cease. Quite the contrary, I find more reason to be pessimistic and believe that this background noise will become a Niagara-like roar that drowns the usability of the internet. Between viruses and spammers and just plain old bad code, the net is now subject to a heavy, and increasing, level of background packet radiation. And the net has very long memory - I still get DNS queries sent to IP addresses that haven't hosted a DNS... [CaveBear Blog]
On August 8th, Professor Lessig will be honored with the first ever American Bar Association Cyberspace Law Excellence Award. The award recognizes “substantial contributions to the development of the law of cyberspace through scholarship, participation in the legislative process or litigation.”
[Lessig News]Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) introduced the Protecting the Rights of Individuals Act, cosponsored by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), legislation that would place modest checks and balances on the most troublesome provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. The bill is backed by a range of organizations from across the political spectrum. August 1, 2003 [Center for Democracy and Technology]
Andrew Odlyzko, author of such gems as Content Is Not King, has a new paper available: Privacy, economics, and price discrimination on the Internet.
Perfect price discrimination has long been raised as one of the justifications for DRM (price discrimination depends on preventing arbitrage, that prevention may be enforced by DRM-backed no-resale clauses); Odlyzko suggests that consumers tend to rebel against overt price discrimination, and will therefore be subject less to DRM than to more covert forms such as bundling. I'm not sure that reduces the dependence on DRM, since DRM and anti-reverse engineering law often enforce the bundling. Price discrimination is one explanation for Lexmark's strategy: Selling printers at a loss but making it up on toner cartridges enables Lexmark to charge use-based pricing on the package.
I think we'll also see trusted computing called into the service of perfect price discrimination. With trusted computing, everyone may be able to get (only) a customized version of software or media, at a "custom" price if a vendor chooses.
The non-monetary privacy costs are high, however. Price discrimination demands the ultimate "know your customer." We trade personal data for frequent flyer discounts, but also for an identification that may allow sellers to charge us more when they recognize we need a product or can afford to spend more. The more price discrimination becomes part of the fabric of online transactions, the less we'll economically be able to opt-out of identification schemes.
[Wendy: The Blog]