Archive for the ‘policy and law’ Category.
April 9, 2003, 12:07 pm
Tim Bray: Bottom-Heavy Email
‘We all got a note from Paul the CFO, who’s a bright and reasonable kind of person, telling us we should put one of those privacy disclaimers at the bottom of outgoing emails. This struck me as a ridiculous idea, so I pushed back a bit, and learned why these things exist. … While I’m not a lawyer, this seemed pretty shaky to me. I mean, if I send you something secret and you screw up and pass it on to the wrong person, and damage ensues, I may well decide to sue your ass even if you do have some boilerplate legalese at the bottom of your email. … “But, the insurance company requires that we do this in order for them to provide coverage.” I don’t have a come-back to that.’
March 17, 2003, 8:29 am
Via beSpacific: Cybercrime, File Sharing and College Students:
On March 13, the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property held an Oversight Hearing on “International Copyright Piracy: Links to Organized Crime and Terrorism” Links are as follows to the Witness List:
John Malcolm, Rich LaMagna, Joan Borsten Vidov, Jack Valenti.
Although not a focus of the hearing, campus-wide file sharing was mentioned. See this related article from IDG News in which Representative John Carter (R- TX) is quoted as stating, “I think it’d be a good idea to go out and actually bust a couple of these college kids… If you want to see college kids duck and run, you let them read the papers and somebody’s got a 33-month sentence in the federal penitentiary for downloading copyrighted materials.”
March 7, 2003, 1:48 pm
Forbes.com: Pfizer’s Definition Of ‘Invention’:
‘Today Pfizer is celebrating because a patent covering a whole class of arthritis medicines was declared invalid. But the world’s largest drug company still insists that a similarly broad patent on impotence pills is valid. Any cynic would note one difference between the two patents: Pfizer owns the impotence patent, not the arthritis one. Still, it is worth taking a look at Pfizer’s definition of the word “invention.”’
March 5, 2003, 12:38 pm
The Wired News article “Gambling on Private Data Search” includes many naive-sounding quotes regarding hashing and data mining. Obviously hashing alone is not enough to avoid serious privacy problems. So is there more to this than the vendor quotes below? (I hope so.)
Systems Research and Development, a company known for helping casinos spot fraud, has developed a product called Anonymous Entity Resolution. It claims the technology can help investigators determine whether a terrorist suspect appears in two separate databases — say, a government watch list and a hotel reservation system.
…
It not only finds the information by comparing records in multiple databases, but also scrambles the information using a “one-way hash function,” which converts a record to a character string that serves as a unique identifier like a fingerprint.
“All it tells them is that they have somebody in common,” said Jeff Jonas, founder and chief scientist at SRD. “It doesn’t tell them who.”
Once a match is found, which happens when disparate records produce the same character string, agents can isolate those particular records without examining any other information.
A record that has been one-way hashed cannot be “un-hashed” back to the original record — any more than “a sausage can be turned back into a pig,” Jonas said.
March 5, 2003, 12:22 pm
UR loses big patent decision:
In his opinion
[PDF], Larimer wrote: “An inventor or patentee is entitled to a patent to protect his work but only if he produces or has possession of something truly new and novel.”
“The invention he claims must be sufficiently concrete so that it can be described for the world to appreciate the specific nature of the work that sets it apart from what was before. The inventor must be able to describe the item to be patented with such clarity that the reader is assured that the inventor actually has possession and knowledge of the unique composition that makes it worthy of patent protection. The patent at issue here does not do that.
“What the reader learns from this patent is a wish or plan or first step for obtaining a desired result. What he appreciates is that the patentee had a goal for achieving a certain end result. The reader can certainly appreciate the goal but establishing goals does not a patent make. The reader also learns that the patentee had not proceeded to do what was necessary to accomplish the desired end. In my view, such an invention is not really one at all.”
February 19, 2003, 4:37 pm
MindJack:
Felten slams self-censoring scientists
Computer science prof and anti-DMCA poster child, Edward Felten, slammed a recent article about scientists considering self-censoring research.
The new editing methods will be voluntary and will differ among the 32 publications and scientific associations that agreed to the effort.
In response, Felten argues:
…the research we would be censoring is often the same research that we would use to defend ourselves.
In the current climate, it’s not surprising that calls for censorship of research are resurfacing. Apparently we need to have a debate on this topic. What we don’t need are slanted arguments that ignore the very real costs of censorship.
February 17, 2003, 12:58 pm
Doc Searls Weblog:
Cut off the customer and the industry dies:
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In Embrace file-sharing, or die, John Snyder, president of Artist House Records, board member of NARAS, and 32-time Grammy nominee, says something I said several years ago; but he does it with infinitely more credibility, and, hopefully, far more effect. Me: |
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Napster and its successors are the listeners’ workaround of the failed radio industry, which replaced trusted music connoisseurs with payola-driven robots that serve only as freebie machines for the record industry’s pop music factories. |
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Why is it that record companies pay dearly for radio play and fight Internet play? What is the real difference between radio and the Internet? Perfect copies? If we look at the Internet as analogous to radio, the problem becomes one of performance rights, not the unlawful exploitation of intellectual property. People are creating their own Radio on their hard drives, and they are constantly changing it. Would this have anything to do with the “McDonaldization” of radio by Clear Channel and others? Would the fact that almost every song on commercial radio is bought and paid for have anything to do with the narrow focus and homogeneous nature of radio? What drives radio is advertising and money, not music. A lot of music gets left behind thanks to the current state of radio; that consumers are rejecting it shouldn’t be surprising. They’re creating their own MP3 playlists, and if the labels were smart, they’d be doing everything in their power to be on those playlists, just like they do everything in their power to be on the playlists of radio stations. Instead, they scream copyright infringement and call their lawyers. |
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I wonder if the rest of the NARAS board is listening. Anybody know? |
February 13, 2003, 1:56 pm
Democracy in the Dark: Public Access Restrictions from Westlaw and LexisNexis
“Mr. Veeck purchased an electronic (CD-ROM) copy of local building codes and copied them onto his free Web site for anyone to use. When the author and purported copyright holder of the codes, Southern Building Code Congress Inc., ordered Mr. Veeck to remove the codes, he sued them, claiming the codes were in the public domain because they had been adopted in full by the local communities as official building codes. Mr. Veeck lost at the district and circuit court levels but appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for a hearing en banc a hearing by all of the judges on the court, rather than the smaller panel of judges that had ruled against him. On June 7, 2002, in an 8 to 6 split, the Court ruled in Mr. Veeck’s favor. In the court opinion, Judge Edith Jones quoted from a 115-year-old decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, Banks v. Manchester14, that exempted court opinions from copyright law as a matter of public policy. FindLaw’s free database of Supreme Court opinions only goes back to 1896, but fortunately Mr. Veeck had posted a copy of the case
on his Web site.”
February 10, 2003, 11:04 am
AP:
Surplus Computer Had Confidential Info
“A state computer put up for sale as surplus contained confidential files naming thousands of people with AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, the state auditor said Thursday.”
