PA Court Establishes Protections For Online Critics Free Speech 11/28/2000; 4:11:49 PM 'In a ruling that establishes new protections for anonymous online authors, a state court judge here said today that public officials and others cannot use frivolous defamation lawsuits to ferret out the identity of their critics.... '"Until today, a public official or employer claiming defamation could get a court to disclose the name of an anonymous Web author simply by filing a lawsuit,"

Judge Orders Sex.com Returned General IP Issues 11/28/2000; 1:57:40 PM 'Adding a definitive chapter to one of the seamiest and steamiest disputes in Internet legal history, a federal judge ordered the domain name sex.com be returned to the man who registered it six years ago.' The most fascinating domain theft story finally comes to a close... hopefully.

Bertelsmann Eyes Napster Pact Music & MP3 11/28/2000; 1:48:22 PM 'German media giant Bertelsmann said on Monday it had begun talks with other music majors on a business model for its song-swap partner Napster and was hopeful they would join the ground-breaking alliance. '"It's all worked out. We have a model," Bertelsmann eCommerce Group chief executive Andreas Schmidt said. "We are bringing it forward now to the other parties .

Should ISPs Be Allowed To Delete Your MP3s? Free Speech 11/24/2000; 7:26:27 PM A slashdot article.  Can ISPs unilaterally delete your information from their servers without even notifying you, even if there's nothing whatsoever illegal about it, simply because... it makes them nervous?  Well, today, the answer seems to be yes.  I think this is a perfect example of what you get when you start holding ISPs responsible for what their customers do.

Online ad companies hit with privacy suits Privacy from Companies 11/24/2000; 12:12:09 AM 'Web advertisers Avenue A and MatchLogic, an Excite@Home subsidiary, were hit with separate complaints in federal court Monday for allegedly tracking customers without their permission. Both companies declined to comment on the suits. ''Plaintiffs allege that (the defendant) has covertly, without consent or authorization, planted 'cookies' upon Internet users' computer hard disk drives and secretly tracked their movements across the Internet,"

Emusic Tracks Napster Naughties... Or Does It? Music & MP3 11/22/2000; 10:27:37 AM 'Emusic engineers have developed a tracking system that can identify infringing materials on Napster -– something the file-trading company said was impossible.' Ok, so how are they doing it...? 'By tracking the MD5 checksum, which uniquely identifies the original source of a song, Hoffman said that Emusic would be able to track files that were being made available from one individual to other Napster users.

Europe Votes Against Software Patents Patents 11/22/2000; 10:16:58 AM From the Slashdot article: 'The text of that article is in German, but thanks to Sebastian Bunka of Austria for providing me this translation: "On the CONVENTION ON THE GRANT OF EUROPEAN PATENTS all 20 memberstates have decided to not change the regulations to the patentability of software and to allow by this basically no patents on software." Else, you can check the fish, but the above is a better translation.

Murphy Munged My Mail - LinkBack Feature Announcement LinkBack 11/21/2000; 9:12:39 PM I tried to send an e-mail out to everybody who is in the LinkBack program, but it appears it got lost en route. So, I'll try to announce the feature this way. The short version is that you can now include any of the LinkBack results in your own weblog, much as I do it in the column to the right of this story.

European Patents Patents 11/21/2000; 4:13:58 PM Europe is starting to debate in earnest about the patentability of software, according to this Wired article. The Software Patent Working Group of the FFII has prepared a list of silly European patents. Some highlights: select cooking recipes to generate a list of items to buy: Calculate lists of things to buy with buying instructions, based on cooking recipes specified by a user. The "

Good background info on the French Yahoo! Case Country Watch: France 11/21/2000; 2:36:32 PM Richard Salis has gathered a lot of good background information on the French Yahoo case, in English and French. Most notable, the translated court decision.