Thursday, June 12, 2003

Privacy vs. Internet piracy, by Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY. [T]he Recording Industry Association of America says it hasn't decided what to do with the names it won last week in a bitter court battle over Internet piracy. Verizon challenged a subpoena requested by the RIAA, refusing to turn over the identities of subscribers accused of trading copyrighted music online. An appeals court last week gave the company two weeks to comply. Verizon turned over the names of four subscribers, traced by the music industry through their numerical Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Internet provider Earthlink, also under subpoena, agreed to reveal a customer's identity after last week's ruling. Verizon is continuing to appeal the case. Despite the victory after months of legal wrangling, the RIAA has done nothing with the information and will not say what it plans to do. As of Tuesday, the trade group had yet to send out cease- and-desist letters, file suit against the subscribers or forward the information to the government for prosecution, among other options. They've been very cagey, says Verizon's Sarah Deutsch, who predicts the RIAA will send letters shortly. She worries that hundreds, if not thousands, of similar requests for users' identities will come over the summer. We're concerned there will be an avalanche, and our subscribers' privacy rights will be violated. The RIAA's Matt Oppenheim won't address the charges but says, I'm not sure how they have any idea what we're going to do. Verizon advised its subscribers to obtain legal assistance. The company isn't sharing their names with the media. 3:04:16 PM    comment []

R.I.P., David Brinkley. 3:04:12 PM    comment []

It's Not Over 'til Michael Powell Sings: Senate weighing a fast-track path to overturn FCC, by Geoff Earle, Featurewell/ZWire. Senate Democrats may employ a controversial and rarely used procedure to try to overturn a new Federal Communications Commission rule on media ownership. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota), an opponent of the new rule who chairs the Democratic Policy Committee, says he is considering using the Congressional Review Act (CRA), a 1996 law that provides a fast-track way for Congress to overturn federal regulations. We do not use it often, Dorgan said. That's what it's there for. By using the procedure, Democrats would have a good chance of forcing the issue to the floor, and at least requiring senators to go on record on the issue. 2:04:14 PM    comment []

Right and Wrong: The copy-right infringement. By John Bloom, National Review Online (November). We now have an exact replica of the medieval Stationers' Company, which controlled the English copyrights, only its names today are Disney, Bertelsmann, and AOL Time Warner. The big media companies, holding the copyrights of dead authors, have said, in effect, that Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton were wrong and that we should go back to the aristocratic system of hereditary ownership, granting copyrights in perpetuity. To effect this result, they've liberally greased the palms of Congressmen in the form of campaign contributions — and it's worked. In the name of Mickey Mouse and other American icons, we have gradually lengthened that 14-year limit on copyrights. At one time it was as much as 99 years, then scaled back to 75 years, then — in one of the most anti-American acts of the last century — suspended entirely in 1998. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of that year says simply that there will be no copyright expirations for 20 years, meaning that everything published between 1923 and 1943 will not be released into the public domain. Presumably they'll take up the matter again in 2018 and decide whether any of these books, movies, or songs are ever set free. There are 400,000 of them. What's especially hypocritical about this law is that many of the works produced in this period, such as The Wizard of Oz, are based on works from previous centuries that are already in the public domain. It's as though Congress is saying that it would be wrong for the heirs of the Brothers Grimm to own a perpetual copyright to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, because it belongs to all people, but Walt Disney's version of it is so sacrosanct it should earn money forever. Besides, if he really is cryogenically preserved, he'll need those royalties when he comes back to visit. . . . Publishers are in the business of expanding capital. The writers who supply them are in the business of expanding civilization itself. Tools for expanding capital are available in many forms. Tools for expanding civilization, on the other hand, are a limited commodity. 2:04:10 PM    comment []

IPR law creates confusion, by Bill Heaney, Taipei Times. The International Federation for the Phonographic Industry [IFPI] Taiwan represents the majority of the record industry in Taiwan and is dissatisfied with the amendments, Robin Lee, secretary general of IFPI Taiwan, told the Taipei Times yesterday in an e-mail statement. Changes that define whether piracy is for profit or not have set a threshold that will allow not-for-profit offenders to get off scot-free, Lee said. On Friday, the legislature said that making more than five copies of a product -- or copies that were worth more than NT$30,000 on the street if sold as legal copies in the original packaging -- constitutes a copyright violation without intent to profit. The penalty for this crime was increased to a maximum of three years in prison and fines of up to NT$750,000 from the current NT$200,000. By defining this threshold, those that make fewer than five copies will automatically be decriminalized, Lee said. . . . There may be more problems ahead. Using the Internet to sell illegal copies of software, movies and music is one area that the law does not sufficiently address, [John] Eastwood [ a lawyer at Winkler Partners and co-chair of the Intellectual Property Committee of the European Chamber of Commerce in Taipei] said. Some infringers have claimed they do not make copies. They say the computer user at the other end who downloads material and then burns a copy onto their hard disk or a compact disk are the actual violators. The new law does not clarify this, making more problems ahead for the legislators, Eastwood said. 2:04:06 PM    comment []

BNA highlights reports: CA COURT REFUSES TO ENFORCE CLICKWRAP ARBITRATION CLAUSE BNA's Electronic Commerce & Law Report reports on Yun v. Ibid.com, an unpublished California case in which the court refused to enforce an arbitration clause found in a clickwrap agreement. The court ruled that Ubid could not compel arbitration with regard to the plaintiff's claims, which focused on unfair competition and false advertising based on shipping charges for an online purchase. Article at http://pubs.bna.com/ip/BNA/eip.nsf/is/a0a6x9c8w9 For a free trial to source of this story, visit http://web.bna.com/products/ip/eplr.htm 1:03:53 PM    comment []

Punks in the Hall: The Ramones and Talking Heads Battle Their Way >From CBGB to Cleveland, by Bill Werde, in the Voice (March 2002). 12:02:53 PM    comment []

News flash! ''Hackers'' break into PBX systems! (Also, there's gambling going on at Rick's.) Phone Networks Open Doors for Hackers, by Brian Krebs (Wash Post). The hackers, according to the Department of Homeland Security, tap into corporate phone systems -- called private branch exchange (PBX) systems -- using them to make long-distance calls to Internet service providers in other cities or overseas. They can work anonymously because the service providers see the activity as coming from within the company whose phone network was compromised. The FBI is pursuing "several investigations" into the problem, which the Department of Homeland Security last week identified as a growing trend in the hacking community. Pet peeve alert: Nothing can ever just be a freakin' problem; it's always a "growing trend." The FBI is urging companies to review and tighten security around their PBX and voicemail systems. A tutorial on locking them down is available from the National Institute of Standards & Technology at: http://www.csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-24/sp800-24pbx.pdf 10:01:45 AM    comment []

G-strings and Ph.D.s. Katherine Frank stripped, interviewed her customers and then wrote a thesis about male desire. Interview by Virginia Vitzthum, in Salon. Anthropologist Katherine Frank spent six years stripping and interviewing 30 of her regular customers to research her new book "G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire." Adapted from her Ph.D. dissertation, it's an academic yet accessible exploration of the exchange between the naked lady on the platform and the man who keeps returning to tuck money in her garter. Frank discusses with equal ease the bounce/rump shaker move and the self-relflexive nature of the post-tourist, and her experience reflects less mind-body dissociation than one might expect. She created a set she calls her Ode to Baudrillard at one of the clubs, stripping off layers to songs (one from "The Matrix" and one by White Zombie) that reference the philosopher who argues that reality -- sorry, "reality" -- has become indistinguishable from its representations, or simulacra. . . . . . . . Among Frank's well-argued conclusions are that the "touristic gaze" is more relevant to the strip club experience than the "male gaze." The strip bar isn't home or work; it's a place where men can vacation either as high rollers or bold explorers of a seedy underclass -- without any risk. She also found that men were obsessed with the authenticity of their interactions with the dancers ("that guy over there is deluded, but she really does like me"). The dancers exploited their customers' longing for "realness" by giving fake real names and fake home phones (cellphones devoted to regulars who considered themselves friends). And in a fascinating chapter called "The Crowded Bedroom: Marriage, Monogamy, and Fantasy," Frank counters the charge that strip bars erode men's abilities to achieve intimacy with a girlfriend or wife and argues that the strip club forays actually held together the marriages of many of her interview subjects. 7:10:05 AM    comment []

Word for Word on the Web, Isaac Newton's Secret Musings. A project at the University of London aims to put the scientist's less famous writings online. By Peter Dizikes. [New York Times: Technology] 7:04:18 AM    comment []

Lessig: freeing privacy reports. Joi Ito has posted a Privacy Report on technology and legislation across the world. It is available under a CreativeCommons license. 6:57:56 AM    comment []

Technology preserves ancient traditions, by Nicolas Rothwell, Australian News Interactive. If the first great change in indigenous affairs since the end of assimilation was the "homelands movement" of the 1970s, and the return of Aboriginal people to their own country, then the rise of information technology can now be seen as the second: endangered songs and obscure, secret patterns, held until now only in the minds of old men, are being safely stored and kept for future generations. New technology, says Howard Morphy of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies, is allowing people to store and access their cultural knowledge. This is part of an emerging shift of great importance. Certainly, it's seen that way within the Aboriginal world. Communities as far afield as Darwin and Arnhem Land are watching progress on with anxious eyes. The clan leaders at Galiwinku, the substantial township at the southern end of Elcho, first formed their idea of a Centre to strengthen their culture long ago. They were aware how many ancestral treasures had flowed into western museums and galleries; they knew anthropologists were coming in and collecting their knowledge. Where was it ending up? According to one of the great animators of the Galiwinku project, Richard Gandhuwuy Garrawurra, the Centre is designed to be at once a kind of university for instruction, a virtual museum, where images of objects held elsewhere can be kept, a gallery for returned masterpieces, an electronic information hub. Gandhuwuy and his colleagues have even drawn up an elaborate floor-plan. The dream began taking shape when the Northern Territory Government channelled some $170,000 into a pilot project at Galiwinku; it opens on June 12. . . . . 4:39:35 AM    comment []