The Trouble With Regulating Hate Free Speech7/24/2000; 10:37:31 AM 'While some would like to see new laws to deal with these sites – wherever they are and as many as there may be – the U.S. constitutional right to free speech protects most of them. Some European nations, however, lack the same free-speech standards. So, like other Internet policy issues such as data privacy and encryption, Europe's standards on hate speech clash with American ones. It's another instance where there's little or no consensus on how to govern this global medium.''National laws used to be buttressed by geographic barriers, customs inspectors and the like. But innovation has been eroding national barriers for decades, and the Internet has eroded them even further.... For now, Europe hopes to make do with a filtering system being developed by the Internet Content Rating Association, a nonprofit British group that's partnered with AOL Europe and the Bertelsmann Foundation, among others. But ICRA's system hinges on the voluntary adoption of a ratings system by content providers. It's hard to imagine hate sites agreeing to rate themselves.'Heh heh heh... can't you see it now? You're browsing around and suddenly a warning dialog comes up: Warning! The site you are now viewing has been rated as the following by the owner: Hateful to Minorities, Hateful to Government, Hateful to Pinko Liberals. Do you wish to continue (Yes/No)?I don't know what the solution is, but I doubt self-labelling will be it.

The Napster Weblog
Music & MP3
7/24/2000; 9:54:02 AM Dave Winer has started a Napster Weblog. It's got a lot of the essays, comments, and pointers to postings on various message boards that I'm not pointing to. He's also looking for someone or someones to help run it, if you find that interesting.

Blow up the Internet! Technology & Sociology7/24/2000; 9:37:52 AM '"Los Cybrids proposes that the Internet SHOULD NOT EXIST!" '"--SHOULD NOT EXIST," echoes Cybridputo #2 in an ominous undertone, as he looms behind Cybridputo #1.' ...'"You have 1,500 e-mails," Cybridputo #1 murmurs archly. "You have 15,000 E-MAILS!" Oh, yeah, the Net's not just eating up the globe in its consumerist maw, it's destroying your very own quality of life, and then there's what computers do to the environment and to your personal privacy to consider, too, the Los Cybrids rail in choreographed staccato.'Just read it; any description I give to the piece would not do it justice. I wish I had witnessed the performance.

Australia Decides Streaming Isn't Broadcasting Country Watch: Australia7/24/2000; 9:35:30 AM But the Internet Industry Association was not ready to celebrate its win until the Government made its decision law.'"We are encouraged, but are we satisfied? No," association executive director Peter Coroneos said last night.''"Until the decision has been given legal effect, the position of our members will remain uncertain," he said. "The review has been concluded in the time frame that we considered appropriate. However, until the decision has been given legal effect, the position of our members will remain uncertain."'There are some odd issues with the article and repeating text segments... beats me what the problem is but it seems to be on their end.

ChatScan Search Engine Misc.7/23/2000; 7:35:49 PM This site will allow you to scan conversations occuring on the Internet Relay Chat channels, covering conversations previously considered so ephermal as to be untracable.More demonstration of your inability to hide.The high-rated postings in the Slashdot thread are unusally informative, including a lot of evidence that the ChatScan engines are not playing nice with others. If the allegations in that thread are true (including using their user's bandwidth for gathering information unrelated to the user's current actions and being major annoyances on entire networks), this is a nasty company.

Toysmart.com can sell customer list Privacy from Companies7/23/2000; 7:31:45 PM The Federal Trade Commision has ruled that Toysmart.com can sell their controversial customer list, as long as the buyer agrees to follow the original Toysmart.com privacy policy.'Under the settlement agreement, Toysmart will file an order today in Bankruptcy Court ("Bankruptcy Order"), prohibiting Toysmart from selling the customer list as a stand-alone asset. The settlement only allows a sale of such lists as a package which includes the entire Web site, and only to a "Qualified Buyer"-- an entity that is in a related market and that expressly agrees to be Toysmart's successor-in-interest as to the customer information.'The Qualified Buyer must abide by the terms of the Toysmart privacy statement. If the buyer wishes to make changes to that policy, it must follow certain procedures to protect consumers. It may not change how the information previously collected by Toysmart is used, unless it provides notice to consumers and obtains their affirmative consent ("opt-in") to the new uses.'I still don't like it. Customers gave Toysmart.com information predicated on the promise that it would never be used by Toysmart.com, and now it will be. The customers have still been lied to, bankruptcy considerations or no.On the positive side, the buyer will have the only legally enforcable privacy policy on the planet; they will the be the only company that won't be able to simply change it on a whim. If they do, then they'd be in violation of the conditions of purchase. Always look for the silver lining (Pas coverage)

Movie studios target Scour with copyright lawsuit DVD & DeCSS7/23/2000; 12:00:05 PM 'While the movie studios have weighed in on the record industry's suit against Napster, it's the first time they've filed their own lawsuit against a file-sharing company that allows movie trading online. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) joined the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in its suit.'Scour is a file sharing service similar in architecture to Napster, but more like Gnutella in its ability to share all file types, not just MP3 music files.The actual complaint filed is available from MPAA's site.

DVD Update: Universal City Studios v. 2600 Magazine, Day 3 (July 19, 2000) DVD & DeCSS7/20/2000; 12:31:55 PM 'Interestingly, Judge Kaplan refused to allow questioning in any area related to when and whether buyers of Warner DVDs receive the "authority of the copyright holder", which is a critical element of whether the buyer is circumventing when they play a DVD. The judge thought it was obvious, and eventually facetiously asked Ms. King whether Time-Warner authorized buyers to play their DVDs on players which have never signed a DVDCCA license, to which she said "No". But this begged the question of exactly how a consumer knows what authority they have been granted, where that authority is defined by a company, whether the company can change its mind later or for specific consumers, whether this authority is general or can have limitations such as "you are authorized to play this Sony movie only on Sony's DVD players", etc. It is our position that the authority to play a DVD is granted to the buyer at the time of purchase, without limitation. Any other reading of the statute produces chaos in the market, since after selling a single copy of a technically-protected work, any copyright owner would have the legal right to decide what players are permitted to exist in the entire market (by withdrawing their authority for some drives to play their work, and then suing drive distributors, as Time Warner sued 2600, to ban them as unauthorized circumventers).'Also: Trascripts of the court proceedings for days one, two and three, along with other legal documents.(In the Internet era, all good news stories should come with links to the primary sources!)

RIP branded 'zombie legislation' as it passes Lords Country Watch: Britain7/20/2000; 10:53:23 AM 'The Lords forced a fresh set of concessions on the government yesterday before passing its email snooping bill.'But industry figures are far from happy with the way the bill stands, saying it will still harm human rights and business confidence.' ...'And in the words of Caspar Bowden, director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, the amended encryption powers are unenforceable and unfathomable. "It's zombie legislation. Clinically dead from macabre wounds, it still lumbers on menacing individual privacy and commercial confidence," said Bowden. 'RIP is due to go before the Commons next week for its final parliamentary stage before becoming law.'

Democrats Halt Meth Bill Censorship7/20/2000; 9:44:50 AM 'H.R. 2987, also known as the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act of 1999, was scheduled for a full-committee markup Wednesday but was postponed due to Democratic concerns over proposed amendments which came as a surprise to Democrats on the committee.'It was not stopped because of the provisions in the bill causing it to be covered on this site regarding censorship, it was stopped because of some amendments to the bill.'The amendments in question proposed mandatory minimums for those found in violation of the act and included Ecstasy and similar narcotics in a "Club Drug Proliferation" section.'...'"Nobody knows what part is going to get you in trouble. If you teach someone how to use a Bunsen burner, is this sufficient to get you indicted? Nobody really knows," [Mary] Johnson [of the ACLU] said.'