LinkBack Online LinkBack9/16/2000; 1:20:24 PM Murphy willing, LinkBack is back online and should stay there for the forseeable future.It's running within Radio Userland now, so I can run it at home without violating any Frontier licensing. (Cool!)The system has been reset and will take some time to flush out the 'old' links.

Olympic Coverage Personal Notes9/16/2000; 12:04:44 PM On a topic utterly unrelated to iRights...If you enjoy watching the Olympics and live in the US you likely detest what passes for Olympic coverage around here, which is usually about 50% sports, and 50% "While we own your eyes, we'd like you to [watch the premiere of this new show, watch this unutterably annoying and sappy "human interest" story, forget that anybody but the US is competing]. If you live in the Northern US, try to find out if you can get the Canadian Broadcasting Channel... I watched it yesterday, and instead of seeing NBC run a tease about a swimmer named Thorpe coming on 'tommorow' (Hype! Hype! Hype!), I watch a guy named Thorpe swim. I am seriously wondering if the CBC will be a day ahead for the entire games or not...Definately check it out if you want to see the Olympics and not an NBC produced pageant vaguely related to the Olympics.

Film evidence challenges BT's claim to hypertext patent Patents9/16/2000; 11:56:06 AM 'BT's tight-fisted grasp on the patent for hyperlinks could be about to slacken following an intriguing posting on Nerd site, Slashdot.'Apparently, on December 9, 1968, Douglas C Engelbart and 17 researchers at the Augmentation Research Center, Stanford Research Institute, in Menlo Park, California presented a 90-minute live public demo in which hypertext was wheeled out for all to see.'Real Player video and a link to the Slashdot discussion is at the site.

All The World's A Bootleg General IP Issues9/15/2000; 4:28:29 PM '... Several of the Nirvana songs on Napster were live recordings of extremely poor sound quality, the vocals barely audible through audience noise. I assumed that these were bootlegged recordings, which by definition are hard to come by. I labeled the files "bootleg-rare." And I added them to the CD as lagniappe. 'Napster allows each member of the "Napster community" to search other members' hard drives for particular songs. My live bootlegs attracted enormous, even rabid interest--they were uploaded by dozens of people, who in turn passed them on to many others. Each time I went on Napster and searched for Nirvana I saw them on other people's machines. Not only did this further add to my guilt, it made me wonder what I had on my machine. Bootlegs are always in demand, but why were these particular bootlegs so special? Investigating, I discovered to my chagrin that these recordings were not bootlegs at all but songs from a perfectly ordinary live album that had been ineptly converted to digital form by enthusiastic but technically unsophisticated Nirvana fans. I had inadvertently reinvented them as precious bootlegs and passed them on to Kurt Cobain aficionados hungry for any unheard notes from the master.'... Although today copyright is mainly treated as a means to reward creators--or castigated as a scam that lets big media companies lock up culture--it has a second, rarely mentioned function: affixing the form of works of art and science. ... The closest thing I can imagine to a solution is for musicians to fix their music in some tangible, immutable form that can only be played on special, authorized machines. I've even thought of a name for it: the "compact disc."'In the phrase "to fix their music in some tangible, immutable form that can only be played on special, authorized machines.", the "that can only be played on special, authorized machines" part is completely superfluous. Once the music is in tangible, immutable form, it's already as protected as it's going to be.I'm certainly not used to articles about Napster that don't make a moral point about the rightness or wrongness of use, it just makes a practical recommendation against using Napster because of quality control issues. I kept futilely hunting for the "Napster good" or "Napster bad" part... felt kinda wierd.

Ruling Recognizes Limits to Online Rights of Trademarks General IP Issues9/15/2000; 9:17:06 AM 'In an important decision that recognizes limits to intellectual property rights online, a federal judge earlier this week ruled that a company's well-known trademarks may be used without authorization by search engines in some programming and sales practices.'I agree with the court decision; there's nothing illegal about asking somebody about a Ford product and having them respond with why Chrysler is so much better then Ford. Just because somebody types in a trademark on a search engine does not obligate the search engine to respond with only stuff approved by the trademark holder, not even advertisements. If the search engine choses to sell advertisements based on words, even trademarks, so be it. I can't say it thrills me, but such are the realities of the Internet market.Forcing the search engines to only respond with trademark-holder approved content is a restraint on free speech.(There are practical issues too... what do you do if someone types in "Ford Chrysler compare"... if Ford buys both Ford and Chrysler, and a Ford ad is displayed, can Chrysler complain? What about international trademarks? And why do we want to turn search engines into international trademark enforcers?)Can't find a copy of the decision.

The Coming Storm Misc.9/14/2000; 3:39:01 PM 'There's no conspiracy. Nobody has a master plan to keep us from having fun. But there is a basic and irreconcilable conflict of interest between those who see computers as user-programmable devices and those who see them solely as devices for delivering their content to their consumers. 'We have a fundamental paradigm shift on our hands, and it's going to get us into trouble. Since computers are user-programmable devices, trying to treat them like just another consumer-electronics device is a recipe for disaster.'I agree with this article, though I think there's more to it then that. Do read this, it's good stuff.

Privacy advocates write Web bug rules
Privacy from Companies
9/14/2000; 3:17:04 PM 'The Privacy Foundation, a nonprofit privacy group based in Denver, is proposing that Internet advertising companies and Web sites disclose the use of ''Web bugs'' wherever they are found online. Web bugs, or clear GIFs, are tiny images embedded in a Web page or HTML-enhanced email that transmit information to a remote computer when the page is viewed.'

Defame Game Serious in Canada
Country Watch: Canada
9/14/2000; 3:14:06 PM 'Canadian e-mailers can no longer hide behind a cloak of anonymity if reasonable grounds exist to show they've distributed defamatory statements over the Internet.'

Napster Goes on the Offensive Music & MP39/14/2000; 2:59:35 PM 'In what could be a last great act of defiance, Napster lawyers filed their final written brief before the copyright infringement case goes to trial. 'The brief accuses the recording industry of withholding licensing, and disputes claims that the company's file-trading application violates copyright law.'Here's the brief.