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Lawrence Lessig on dinosaurs taking over
Business Week online technology reporter Jane Black has a good interview with Lawrence Lessig covering Lessig’s concern about the entertainment industry’s power grab for control of the Internet....
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The case for dumb plumbing
Imagine if you paid for your home’s plumbing by the type of waste transported through the system. You’d pay one rate for solid waste, another rate for liquid, and yet another for any, um, mysterious...
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NPR linking policy
If you don’t want to be linked, you shouldn’t be on the Web. What is it going to take for organizations to understand that? National Public Radio is the latest organization to attempt to dictate a...
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The war against customers
[n.b.: This is a condensed version of an article originally published here, written at the request of, and is scheduled for publication in, spiked.] While the Copyright Act of 1790, Title 17, Chapter...
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RIAA feels its oats
Late last week, 13 record labels filed a federal lawsuit in New York, seeking a judicial order to force four major Internet backbone providers — AT&T, Cable and Wireless, Sprint, and UUNet — to...
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Gnomedex: Doc Searls
Doc is supposed to be speaking about the future of Linux, but he damn sure had a better time last night than I did. After all, he’s a former marketer and readily acknowledges he can’t turn down a...
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Internet too moral-free for News Corp. president
Last week Peter Chernin, president of News Corp., told attendees of the Progress & Freedom Foundation Aspen Summit that the Internet has become a “moral-free zone” full of pornography, spam, and...
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Apple says DVD burning okay only on its equipment
Steve Jobs’ infamous reality distortion field is a powerful thing. I almost get sucked into it on a semi-regular basis. My last Macintosh was a “WallStreet” PowerBook. I loved it, but it was pre-OS X...
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The coming copyright storm
With a fisted left hand, the entertainment industry pays BayTSP run by former black-hat cracker, Mark Ishikawa, up to US$50,000 per month to determine who is illegally copying protected works on the...
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Digital Choice and Freedom Act
Last week, Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-California) introduced the Digital Choice and Freedom Act, proposed legislation that would amend the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to specifically...
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Technology Consumer Bill of Rights
Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Representative Christopher Cox (R-California) have introduced legislation in both US congressional bodies that would protect the rights of consumers to use digital...
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Bad code in Washington
It’s midterm election day in America when some percentage of us — usually less than half — hold our noses and go to the polls. Hopefully by now you’ve taken the time to inform yourself and you’re...
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EFF and the doctrine of pre-emptive litigation
Call it the doctrine of pre-emptive litigation. EFF has filed a lawsuit against Diebold, Inc., the manufacturer of an electronic voting machine that is said to be “unverifiable.” When a citizen votes,...
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Republican staffers may have hacked Democrat computers
Senate Judiciary Committee Republican staffers have reportedly hacked into Democrat computers for more than a year, copying documents and passing them on to sympathetic corporate media hands. So says...
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The tyranny of copyright
“The movie and music industries have succeeded in lobbying lawmakers to allow them to tighten their grips on their creations by lengthening copyright terms. The law has also extended the scope of...
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DMCRA finally gets a hearing
Tomorrow, 12 May 2004, the Digital Media Consumers’ Rights Act (DMCRA), H.R. 107, finally gets a hearing in front of the Trade, Commerce, and Consumer Protection subcommittee of the House Energy and...
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Fair use and the DMCA
Corporate copyright holders have taken to issuing Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown orders with wild abandon. Such wild abandon, in fact, that they’ve begun to overstep legal bounds....
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Comes the internet and we still need the wine not the bottle
“We Need To Change Copyright Laws To Save Newspapers” by Eric Clemons and Nehal Madhani is so terribly misguided as to be laughable if it weren’t representative of the views of so many powerful...
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Ron Wyden saves the internet (at least for this year)
The US entertainment cartel‘s latest wet dream, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), calls for a mandated government-run blacklist where domain name service (DNS), credit...
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EMI asks court to bar EFF amicus brief
UK record label EMI has asked a federal judge in New York to bar the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) from filing an amicus curiae brief in the record label’s lawsuit against MP3tunes. Amicus...
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The blotter: Week ending 1 May 2011
Business The US Supreme Court has ruled (.pdf; 258KB) that corporations can use contracts that include a clause forbidding customers from forming groups for class-action lawsuits and group...
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Internet service providers to shill for entertainment cartel
For years the entertainment cartel has been nipping at the heels of the large internet service providers (ISPs) — AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon — to join in their war...
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Entertainment cartel wants to break the internet
In an effort to eliminate any and all intellectual property infringement online, the entertainment cartel has this recurring wet dream of being allowed to interfere with the internet. Late last month...
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Librarian of Congress DMCA exemptions
When the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed into law in 1998, the Librarian of Congress was charged with the power to grant certain exemptions. The Librarian’s latest exemptions (.pdf;...
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US Supremes uphold first-sale doctrine
The US Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision (.pdf; 365KB), has upheld the first-sale doctrine of US copyright law by ruling that individuals who purchase foreign copyrighted works may resell them without...
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There ought to be a three-strikes rule in corporate lawsuits
In 2010, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in Viacom v. YouTube, ruled against Viacom finding that YouTube was protected by the “safe harbor” provisions of Section...
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That’s it for Dropbox
Dropbox has recently changed its terms of service to include a forced arbitration clause. “Arbitration is a faster and more efficient way to resolve legal disputes, and it provides a good alternative...
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US Supremes rule new uses for old technologies illegal
The US Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, has ruled that Aereo — a service that uses tiny antennas to capture television broadcasts, store them, and stream them to subscribers — violated copyright law....
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Right to repair
The last vehicle I owned that I could actually work on was a 1970 Volkswagen pop-top camper. I was able to do most of the work on that vehicle myself — there was very little that couldn’t be fixed...
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Using copyright to protect us from ourselves
As I’ve written previously, Massachusetts has a “right to repair” law requiring motor vehicle manufacturers to use a standard, open interface for accessing service data and to sell tools and technical...
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Do you own that new car? Really?
Once upon a time, when you tottered down to your local Chevy dealer, wrote a big check, and drove off in that new Impala, you actually owned the automobile. Same process if you were a farmer and the...
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Hack your tractors
Every three years in the US, the Librarian of Congress considers proposals for exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and issues new rules if necessary. Late last month, David Mao...
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Minnesota’s virtually unknown right to repair legislation
The Minnesota Legislature is currently adjourned sine die. That means they don’t know when they’re coming back. Isn’t that special? We’ll have to wait for the 90th Minnesota Legislature to convene in...
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EFF files lawsuit challenging DMCA anti-circumvention rule
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a long-awaited lawsuit (.pdf; 271KB) challenging the constitutionality of section 1201 (commonly referred to as the “anti-circumvention rule“) of the...
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Carl Malamud still stirring it up
Carl Malamud is — and remains — one of my original internet heroes. The internet’s original information access warrior, Malamud is responsible for the availability of the US Securities and Exchange...
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