Law and Information

More here. Still waiting for the slip opinion. Update: Picker MobBlog has it.

One hour and ten minutes to go. Fingers crossed.

This, for good reasons, gets a lot of attention. See also the work of my fellow Fellow Rebecca MacKinnon. Eaerlier coverage and experiments (December 2004) here. I’m interested (to be sure: that doesn’t mean that I’m in favor of it!) in blog filtering from an information quality perspective. Viewed from that angle, MSN spaces filtering in the US is of similar interest to me, although it is obvious that the effects are much different.

An update in English on the current revision of the Swiss Copyright Act is available here. It does not come as a surprise that the anti-circumvention provisions as well as the proposed levy on CD and DVD burners are contested. Note that iTunes - recently launched in Switzerland (see here and here) - is now used to call for thougher legal protection of DRM. I translated the draft anti-circumvention provisions here.

I’ve updated our EUCD collection of materials website. The following countries recently implemented the EUCD: Belgium, Cyprus, Portugal, and Sweden. Unfortunately, English translations are not in all cases available. Please let me know if you know about resources and/or other implementations. (Thanks to Marcella for pointers.)

Check out the Berkman Center’s website for reactions. It turns out that the entertainment industry still does not like the study. We’ve also made public our comments on the draft OECD report on digital music.

Earlier this year, we reported that at all major search engines in Germany (Google, Lycos Europe, MSN Deutschland, AOL Deutschland, Yahoo, T-Online, and t-info) have reached an agreement to filter harmful-to-minors content.Recently, Marcell Machill tested the search engines’ complicance with their own code of conduct. Find a summary of the results here.

Find here a terrific report by the OECD on the digital music industry (pre-release.) The report includes, inter alia, references to Terry Fisher’s seminal book Promises to Keep as well as to the Berkman Center’s iTunes case study.

The report concludes that online music distribution will grow significantly over the next few years, will force the music industry to reconsider their business models, and will continue to pose regulatory challenges to governments. The study includes a detailed impact analysis of digital music distribution on artists, consumers, the record industry, and new intermediaries.

The OECD underlines the positive potential of digital distribution, both as a new business model and a cultural phenomenon. It’s report further concludes that Internet-based piracy may be reduced, if licensed file-sharing and new forms of superdistribution evolve.

The study, part of the OECD Project on Digital Broadband Content, is the outcome of work involving a wide range of stakeholders, including many governments. It’s among the first roadmaps exploring as to how public policy should be re-evaluated in this space.

The Berkman Center’s Digital Media Team was invited to comment on a draft version of this report. Today, we congratulate the study’s authors to a thorough multi-stakeholder analysis, written in a challenging environment.

Stay tuned.

Update: The OECD report is also featured in the latest edition of The Economist (subscription required.) See also WIRED News with reactions from IFPI.

Baker & McKenzie’s Premium Global E-Law Alert (June 7th edition, subscription required) reports:

BNA’s Electronic Commerce & Law Report (subscription required) reports that French attorneys have filed a class action against six of France’s leading audio-visual sector firms, claiming that the use of copy control technology on DVDs violates consumers’ right to make private copies for personal use. The complaint is based on a French appellate court’s ruling mentioned here.