American trade negotiators have threatened to scuttle Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organisation unless the country shuts down the AllOfMP3.com website, which sells music under Russian copyright law, despite the ire of the RIAA and its international puppet organisation, IFPI — via Boing Boing
A flood of legislation released by the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act threatens to drown whole classes of consumer electronics
Folks who value creative content rescued from obscurity may be concerned about major fee increases proposed by the US Copyright Office. At the end of this month, they plan to double the fee for copyright records searching from $75 to $150 per hour (it was $20/hr as recently as 1999), and add a new $100 fee just to give frugal searchers an estimate of how much a real search is likely to cost — va Boing Boing
ThePirateBay.org, a longtime fixture of the BitTorrent community, is currently under investigation. Their servers have been seized by the Swedish police
In yet another blow against free speech rights, the Supreme Court decided that government employees who report wrongdoing do not enjoy 1st Amendment rights while on the job
The US Patent and Trademark Office has rejected 19 of the 47 claims in a patent held by Forgent Networks, which the company has been using to assert licensing rights related to the JPEG digital image standard
China has launched a case against American chipmaker Intel’s near-monopoly on encryption standards for wireless local area network equipment
France is contemplating legislation designed to to force compatibility between digital songs and the different machines that play them
. Known colloquially as the iPod bill, it is opposed by Apple, the Business Software Alliance, and others who refer to it as state-sponsored piracy
. Two versions of the bill have already passed France’s Senate and National Assembly. Under the proposed law companies could have to reveal trade secrets of their software so that their songs can play on competitors’ devices
Two exceedingly dim New York teenagers have been arrested after trying to extort $150,000 from the makers of MySpace, the popular online community site. MySpace discovered the intrusion earlier this year and blocked it. The Los Angeles-based company also reported the incident to authorities. During the course of the investigation, threats were made that unless $150,000 was paid, new exploit code would be released, according to the statement. By this time, the sting operation had been set up, so instead of meeting with MySpace late last week, the pair from New York met with undercover officers from the US Secret Service and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Bureau of Investigation
In the wake of high-profile lawsuits involving BlackBerry and eBay, Congress is once again talking about fixing what the technology industry says is a thoroughly broken patent system
As Microsoft moves its internal desktop systems to Windows Vista, the company is contemplating whether to change a long running tradition and take away admin rights from its employees in order to improve security
Pearl Jam released their first music video in quite a while under a Creative Commons licence allowing anyone to legally copy, distribute and share the clip
for noncommercial purposes. Creative Commons thinks this may be the first video produced by a major label ever to be CC-licensed. So although the file is only available as a free download via Google Video through 24 May, fans can continue sharing it online themselves in perpetuity — via Slashdot
Official guidance on how to teach Scottish schoolchildren about gay sex is being issued for the first time since the abolition of laws which banned promoting
homosexuality in schools
Blue Security, a prominent crusader against unsolicited e-mail ads withdrew from an escalating cyberwar with spammers on Wednesday after his Web site and numerous others came under a massive retaliatory attack
Natural allies in the music industry — record labels and a leading satellite service — are on opposing sides in a federal lawsuit over how consumers may legally record songs using next-generation radio devices
Australia is finally reforming its backwards copyright law, which made it illegal to record shows off the TV and radio, and to rip CDs for personal playback. However, in the process, they proposed a new law that is even more backwards — one that prohibits watching your recorded shows more than once, one that doesn’t allow you to make backups of your CDs, and that doesn’t let you loan them to friends — via Boing Boing
Australians will legally be able to record TV and radio programs and transfer material from CDs to mp3 players, under proposed copyright changes
According to his official biography, Richard Kelly is the director of the acclaimed Donnie Darko, the writer of the less acclaimed Domino and a contender for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes film festival. According to the Department of Homeland Security he is a suspected terrorist who may now be prevented from travelling to Cannes next week after the morons appear confused him with another man, James Kelly
, who is on the terrorist watch list. Kelly’s full name is James Richard Kelly — via Warren Ellis
The National Security Agency’s goal to create a database of every call ever made inside the USA. Aided by the cooperation of US telecom corporations, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of tens of millions of Americans; the vast majority of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. Only Qwest refused to give the NSA information because they were uneasy about giving information to the government without the proper warrants. The usefulness of the NSA’s domestic phone call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear
The OpenStreetMap project to create a copyright-free map of the Isle of Wight was a success, so they’re taking on Manchester next — via Boing Boing
RSS – Posts