Posted on May 31st, 2006 by Tim Armstrong
Swedish police today raided several sites where servers suspected of being used in file-sharing were located, seizing several computers, including one allegedly belonging to a pro-piracy advocacy organization, and arresting three people in their 20s. (A page summarizing the raid is now posted at the target site’s URL, piratebay.org.)
Pirate Bay claimed to be the […]
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Filed under: RIAA, Digital Media, Copyright, Intermediaries
Posted on May 31st, 2006 by Derek Bambauer
The Brennan Center for Justice, located at NYU’s law school, put out a report on Internet filtering in U.S. schools and libraries. The study is essentially a literature review; it collects and summarizes most analyses of the effectiveness and errors of filtering software (such as NetNanny or SmartFilter) employed in response to the Children’s […]
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Filed under: Filtering, Intermediaries
Posted on May 31st, 2006 by William McGeveran
Update: Bignami has now posted on the ECJ’s airline records decision.
In a recent guest post at Concurring Opinions, privacy expert Francesca Bignami argued that the NSA’s obtention of domestic telephone records would not be allowed under European privacy law. In addition to being an interesting comparative law analysis, Bignami pointed out another consequence of […]
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Filed under: NSA, Privacy
Posted on May 30th, 2006 by William McGeveran
The Crooked Timber blog has organized an online “seminar” to discuss the important new book by Yochai Benkler, entitled The Wealth of Networks. The book is still sitting on my guilt-inducing summer reading pile (formerly the spring reading pile), but Benkler’s exciting presentation of its premise at the Berkman Center last month, combined with the […]
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Filed under: Berkman, Scholarship, Blogging
Posted on May 28th, 2006 by William McGeveran
My soon-to-be hometown newspaper, the Star Tribune, has run a story on net neutrality that makes the complex subject comprehensible to non-geeks. Not perfect, but a pretty good model for the hardworking activists promoting net neutrality in Congress. The story’s “lede” paints a nice picture:
Imagine if the Internet were like cable TV.
You pay $40 a […]
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Filed under: Network Neutrality, Intermediaries
Posted on May 25th, 2006 by William McGeveran
When the rightsholder for a potentially copyrighted work cannot be identified and located, any use of it that would require a license creates significant legal risk. Such works are called “orphan works.” Effectively, they are frozen in a legal form of suspended animation until enough time elapses that they finally fall into the public domain.
This […]
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Filed under: Education & Copyright, Copyright
Posted on May 25th, 2006 by William McGeveran
The Harvard Law Review just published Jonathan Zittrain’s “The Generative Internet,” 119 Harv. L. Rev. 1974 (2006). Given the standing of Zittrain (or, as everyone at the Berkman Center calls him, “JZ”) in the internet law community and the scope of his article, it immediately becomes a must-read.
There is much more to say about this […]
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Filed under: Network Neutrality, Security, Internet & Society, Berkman, Intermediaries, Peer Production, Scholarship, Anonymity
Posted on May 24th, 2006 by William McGeveran
True story: we are all sitting around the table at a Berkman Center “fellows’ hour” discussion yesterday afternoon, and as usual most people have their laptops open in front of them, “multitasking.” Suddenly, one of the fellows interjects that he has just seen a report of a discovery that hardware keyloggers are built into Dell […]
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Filed under: Privacy, Berkman, Peer Production, Blogging
Posted on May 23rd, 2006 by William McGeveran
The New York Times noted yesterday [registration required] that C-SPAN’s recording of the Stephen Colbert comedy routine from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was the number one download at iTunes last weekend, at $1.95 a pop. (Hat tip: Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire)
That’s the same routine that, as I wrote previously, C-SPAN demanded be taken down […]
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Filed under: Education & Copyright, Intermediaries
Posted on May 23rd, 2006 by William McGeveran
As widely reported, personal data about some 26.5 million veterans fell into the wrong hands as the result of a mistake by the federal Department of Veterans Affairs. Apparently a Department employee had brought home computer disks containing the personal data (contrary to Department policy) and his home was burglarized. See this Washington Post story […]
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Filed under: Privacy