Carnivore does more than previously thought
Surveillance and Privacy from Government
10/5/2000; 12:53:13 PM 'Heavily censored FBI documents obtained by US watchdog outfit the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC), under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, indicate that the FBI's electronic snoop known as Carnivore might be able to monitor a good deal more than just e-mail traffic.
'Among the capabilities that peek out from behind all the indelible black swaths in the documents is an ability to reconstruct an entire Web page as viewed by a subject. A planned, updated version may even be able to capture voice-over-Web communications. Presently the system can capture and record all packet traffic to and from a selected IP, while monitoring a subject's on-line movements.'
What Every American Should Know About Copyright General IP Issues10/4/2000; 3:08:28 PM 'Another point that isn't very well known, that has, in fact, been buried into near complete obscurity is that the copyright owner does not own the work, only the copyright. The work, itself, is owned by no one. Intellectual Property, a very big issue in the modern world, has no owner. You can only own the right to copy a work, not the work itself. The difference between these two points is important, though of little practical value to the average person. The entity with the copyright is the only one who can offer the copies for distribution, or not. Here we arrive at what is known as "The First Sale Doctrine," which governs the ownership of individual copies. The Entertainment Industry and the Software Industry both want you to believe that you don't own the copy of the work that you have purchased. First Sale Doctrine disagrees. Once the copyright owner has been compensated (you paid for the copy) they have no further rights toward that individual copy. As owner of the copy, it is your right to decide what to do with it, with the obvious exception of making further copies....Think about this: under the original copyright law, Star Wars would become public domain in 2005. Old episodes of Bonanza and I Love Lucy would already be public domain. You could legally embroider pictures of Mickey Mouse onto T-shirts and sell them. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" would belong to everyone as would "Gone With the Wind." All of those great Rock 'n' Roll songs from the fifties and sixties would be public and no one could complain no matter how many MP3's you distributed of them. Basically, anything published before 1972 would belong to the people of America. Books, TV, movies, art and music all work through the copyright laws and all of them have been given what nearly amounts to a perpetual monopoly.'
Patent Combat Time Personal Commentary10/4/2000; 2:42:25 PM As I've been writing iRights: The Essay, I've been exploring a lot of new territory, hopefully stuff that nobody's ever explored before. (At the very least, I haven't seen it from anybody else.)So I was talking about the recent bill before Congress to make MP3 "beaming" as implemented by MP3.com explicitly allowed (previous coverage), and I came up with an example of why the bill is shortsighted. I want to get this out in public before anybody patents it, so I don't want to wait until I publish the essay.Here is a description of a system to allow people to obtain digital copies of movies they already own a legitimate copy of via internet transmission.A company will obtain or create digital versions of movies, without the need for copyright clearence on these videos. Customers of this company will purchase or otherwise recieve a device that will in all likelihood have all the functionality of a TiVo, but will also include a broadband internet connections and the ability to play VHS tapes.When one of these devices is aquired and installed, it will go through some subscription setup that will enable the company and the user to maintain profiles of what movies are legitimately owned. When the user inserts a commercial videotape into the device, the device will read the codes encoded on the VHS tape and transmit these codes to the company's server, which will in turn either send back the movie in a digital form, or store that the user is now allowed to access that movie. (This depends on exactly which year this device is created, and whether you can bet on being able to watch a movie in real time. Either way, you'll get permission to download at will, as it will still be a long time before you'll have enough storage to dedicate it to all the digital video you can have.)(BTW, these codes on VHS tapes already exist. Listen to the end or a beginning of a commercial VHS tape, and you can hear them. They sound like touch-tone phone tones. Recordings off of the television lack these codes.)Viola, a movie "beaming" service, which unless someone has beaten me to is now not patentable (hopefully). Is the law going to then protect that, as Congress may be moving towards protecting MP3.com like activities, or not? Really, the law should either protect all media or no media, but the special-case for music is short-sighted and merely adds complexity to an already too-complex system.
Artificial stupidity: One-Half a Manifesto
Misc.
10/4/2000; 11:05:24 AM
This is from a few days ago, but I think that the Salon article, which includes some of the replies to the One-Half of a Manifesto, is sufficiently interesting to merit posting here. I recommend reading the original manifesto, and I've heard the "printer friendly version" is easier to deal with, as it isn't broken into 16 pieces.
Post-Debate comment
Personal Commentary
10/4/2000; 10:44:42 AM Isn't it sick that the one issue that can unify liberal and conservative, Republican and Democrat, rich and poor, basically everybody except those intimately involved in politics as a way of life, is how little we want to elect either Bush or Gore into our top office?
Armey Criticizes Carnivore Review
Surveillance and Privacy from Government
10/4/2000; 10:28:46 AM
'The Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute has barely begun its review of Carnivore, an electronic-surveillance system being used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but already a Congressional leader is branding the review a "sham."
Richard K. Armey, the Texas Republican who is majority leader of the House of Representatives, criticized the Justice Department on Thursday for selecting the research institute, a nonprofit affiliate of I.I.T., because one member of the institute's review team worked for the Clinton administration and another was once an employee of the Justice Department.'
‘Business-method’ patents Patents10/3/2000; 2:26:39 PM 'Such patents on “business methods,” which have been soaring in recent years, have been denounced for allowing the patent owners to put a lock on innovation or to profit unfairly from it. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been accused of issuing way too many such patents, and for dubious innovations.'The issue is heating up in Washington.'
Moving from Units to Eunuchs Misc.10/3/2000; 2:17:46 PM 'Since this minimum per-unit cost is best spread over a large number of titles (the "economies of scale" effect), the current system favors a handful of major labels, all of which are stuck with roughly the same magnitude of distribution costs. 'The Internet upends all of that, because payment for distribution has been completely decoupled from the data delivered. Your monthly ISP bill doesn’t fluctuate, whether you download every Grateful Dead MP3 ever made or only send email to your mother on Sundays. When compared to the physical world, there is no such thing as online "distribution," in that Sony and Time Warner can’t base their markup on the costs of delivery....'Sometime in the next 12 months, someone with a large enough catalog of popular entertainment–probably music, because video isn’t yet ready for prime time–is going to begin an online price war. When that happens, all the players will quickly realize that the old pricing models no longer apply.... once the change begins, look for it to be swifter than almost anyone imagines.'Excellent article.
Web-chopping comes home to the desktop Content Integrity10/3/2000; 1:36:20 PM 'These programs, with names like DoDots, Snippets, Yodlee, Onepage and Octopus, are actually browsers on steroids that put the user in charge of the Internet experience by providing a set of tools which allow the surfer to copy and paste content from an infinite number of web sites into one personally-designed web page.... Octopus even allows users to post their personally designed web-pages on the site, so that people with similar interests can use the new design rather than have to create their own version.'What users do on their own systems is basically up-to-them; publishing the slicing & dicing instructions goes to far, but I've been over that already. What's interesting is this quote at the end: 'Analyst Jakob Nielsen is convinced that these new technologies will force content providers to come up with new concepts for revenue - such as setting up arrangements with ISP's or charging subscriptions or micro-payments.'A reminder that if you abuse a system, it can change. If you have to pay to access it ceases to be such a big deal to construct 'personalized' home pages, because as long as people get their money, they tend to be happy.
Will Personalization Be The End of Editorial Integrity? Personal Commentary10/3/2000; 1:21:46 PM I hold in my hands the latest issue of the Official Dreamcast Magazine... covering the Dreamcast, which is the latest & greatest video gaming console put out by Sega. Contained inside this magazine are:
- Dreamcast news & editorials
- Reviews of Dreamcast games
- Advertising by the third-party manufacturors about their Dreamcast games and perhipherals