US politicians and journalists have said that internet bloggers should enjoy traditional press freedoms and not face regulation as political groups
Apple won the green light to subpoena amateur publishers for their confidential sources, a Californian Judge ruled today. Apple Computer, which wants to discover who leaked product information to three web sites, can now proceed with its subpoena against one of the ISPs hosting two of the websites, Santa Clara county court Judge James Kleinberg has ruled, as well as the web sites themselves
A french appeal court has ruled in favour of a filesharer who downloaded 500 odd movies, on the grounds that they were private copies, that he didn’t redistributed them and that a tax was payed on blank media
The russian site Allofmp3.com, which had been reported as being under investigation recently, has been let off the hook by the Russian DA, becuase of a loophole in russian law which allows users create copies of songs by request. Basically, even though the courts have found their site operator’s behavior to be illegal — they can’t prosecute because the user dynamically creates copies of songs to be downloaded themselves
A pair of New York inventors believe they can thwart music pirates by secretly burying an anti-piracy warning in a track, which is disinterred if the copyright has been abused. Let’s see how long that lasts before it’s thwarted
Efforts to stamp out online piracy could give Hollywood a veto over new technology and stifle innovation, peer-to-peer software companies and their supporters told the US Supreme Court. Copyright holders have long sought to quash innovations from the printing press to the videocassette recorder to the CD burner that they have found threatening
An Iranian weblogger has been jailed for 14 years on charges of spying and aiding foreign counter-revolutionaries. Arash Sigarchi, who also edits a newspaper in northern Iran, was arrested last month after using his blog to criticise the arrest of other online journalists — via Politechbot
John Gilmore, the millionare who cofounded the EFF, has been prohibited from travelling because he refused to show an ID while boarding an airplane. He’s been under this self-imposed ban since 2002. When a gate agent asked for his ID. Gilmore asked her why. It is the law, she said. Gilmore asked to see the law. Nobody could produce a copy. To date, nobody has. The regulation that mandates ID at airports is Sensitive Security Information
. The law, as it turns out, is unavailable for inspection. What started out as a weekend trip to Washington became a crawl through the courts in search of an answer to Gilmore’s question: Why?
Two British students, Richard Smith and Luke Bateman, have researched America’s stupidest laws and are spending this summer travelling from state to state, violating them — via boingboing
Starting in the liberal state of California, they hope to evade the attention of local police officers when they ride a bike in a swimming pool and curse on a crazy-golf course.
In the far more conservative — and landlocked — state of Utah, they will risk the penitentiary when they hire a boat and attempt to go whale-hunting.
If they manage to outwit state troopers in Utah, and perhaps federal agents on their trail, they will be able to take a deserved, but nevertheless illegal, rest when they have a nap in a cheese factory in South Dakota
A woman has sued Hewlett Packard, claiming the ink cartridges for their printers are secretly programmed to expire on a certain date, in some cases rendering them useless before they are even installed in a printer. For anyone who’s run into this problem, there is a workaround
Matthew Reed from TigerLilly Tattoo and DesignWorks, the Oregon tattoo artist who inked NBA star Rasheed Wallace’s arm, is suing for copyright infringement because Rasheed’s tattoo is featured prominently in a Nike TV and internet ad campaign. It only seems fair that he be compensated for Nike making money from his artwork — via boingboing
The American Bar Association has claimed that thousands of suspects unable to afford lawyers are wrongly convicted each year because they are pressured to accept guilty pleas or have incompetent attorneys
Lexmark is dead in the water with their hopes to use the DMCA to force their customers to buy their over-priced toner. Their request for another hearing has been denied
According to NSW Justice Minister John Hatzistergos, the Commonwealth need to conduct a trial of mobile phone jamming equipment in prison under the usual dodgy excuse of combat terrorists
An online forum with eBay’s Australian trust and safety director has highlighted the frustration many local users of the auction site feel at the speed of response to problems with fraud and account spoofing
Two campaigners who were found to have distributed a leaflet in the mid-1980s libelling the McDonald’s fast food chain were denied their rights to free speech and a fair hearing, the European Court of Human Rights ruled yesterday
A federal judge has struck down a Bush administration rule that lowered Endangered Species Act protection for wolves that are migrating out of strongholds in the Northern Rockies and Great Lakes into neighbouring states. In a ruling released yesterday, US District Judge Robert Jones in Portland rescinded the April 2003 decision by the US Fish and Wildlife Service which had divided wolf range into three areas and had reclassified the Eastern and Western populations as threatened instead of endangered. The agency had left wolves in the Southwest in the endangered category
South Australian Premier Mike Rann wants an immediate investigation into why an Australian woman was held in the Baxter detention centre for four months. Cornelia Rau, 39, who went missing from the Manly psychiatric hospital in Sydney in March 2004, spent four of 10 months’ detention in Baxter after being found in far north Queensland without identification. She spent the other six months in the Women’s Correctional Centre in Brisbane, after Queensland police believed she was an illegal immigrant. She was turned over by police to immigration officials, who could not confirm her identity
The Canadian government is moving to counter worries surrounding Canadian citizens’ privacy being compromised by the United States’ Patriot act. Apparently the FBI currently has the right, through Patriot, to search documents which may contain Canadian information sent to US firms carrying out work under contract. Thankfully, privacy still means something up there
Russian President Vladimir Putin has sent a statement to the State Duma, or lower house of parliament, attacking part of an anti-terror bill that would restrict media coverage of terrorist attacks and calling it unconstitutional. You’ve got to laugh when it’s Russia who are more progressive than the so-called free west
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