Slashdot interview with Jordan Pollack General IP Issues6/5/2000; 7:14:05 AM April 12, 2000: Wow! You must read the last two questions of this Slashdot interview with Jordan Pollack!

I am simply saying that permanent use and resale licenses to changeable information (software, art, literature, music, movies) which can be traded securely, without loss or duplication, in a public market, is a form of currency.
Interesting thought!

China conducting 'pre-war recon' on line Misc.6/5/2000; 7:14:02 AM April 11, 2000: China conducting 'pre-war recon' on line: "'China has the biggest [information warfare] programme from the standpoint of being able to attack our infrastructure,' Chinese military specialist William Triplett said during an interview on the CBS News programme 60 Minutes this weekend."

Good plan for China. Not so good for us.

The Pentagon is worried. If an attack were carried out, even just a test attack, it's likely that it would go undetected and might well be attributed to equipment failure or some natural event, US Joint Task Force on Computer Network Defence Director General John Campbell pointed out.

The Clinton Administration, too, is very worried about cyber-warfare, but inexplicably not at all worried about the People's Liberation Army.

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Anti-censorship site censored Censorship6/5/2000; 7:13:59 AM April 11, 2000: "The director of the Campaign Against Censorship of the Internet in Britain has challenged Dr Laurence Godfrey to sue him following claims by CACIB that it was gagged over the publication of a story on its Web site."

"Hutty, who wrote the story, said: 'What I've written is not an actionable libel. If he wants to sue it's up to him,' he said. 'We stand behind our comments, but the ISP is naturally neither willing nor able to get involved. The result is that we are presumed guilty, and censored, because our ISP does not want to pay the legal fees to defend us.'"

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Copy Protection Personal Notes6/5/2000; 7:13:57 AM Random thoughts: Remember copy-protection on software? Will Gnutella and the like, making "piracy" a matter of opening a program and typing in the name of the desired software, rather then a 30-60 minute hunt on the web for a working FTP site, bring back the days of black print on dark wine red paper?

Of course, such a low tech solution now-a-days would be of little use. Copy protection stopped because it ceased to be worth annoying the consumer; it might start being worth it again in the near future for commercial companies.

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Missing the point on Microsoft General IP Issues6/5/2000; 7:13:51 AM April 10, 2000: I missed this article on Friday... it has some great stuff in it.

The state is involved in creating [intellecutal-property based] monopolies, because there are choices to be made in designing property systems. Lots of them, in fact. One can agree with the idea that there should be intellectual property rights without answering the question "How far should those rights stretch? What conditions should Microsoft be able to attach to its software licenses? Restraints on competition? On criticism? To get the benefits of the state property grant, should it have to make source code available under a compulsory license? Should it be able to use copyright law to restrict its competitors from making "interoperable" products?"
In the Microsoft case, indeed in almost all of the digital monopoly cases, the dominant company will have to build its strategies around the contours of the original state monopoly we call intellectual property. Expand those rights, and the monopolies form quicker, grow larger.
If I had my way, when all was said and done, while I'd clean up the system and eliminate a lot of ambiguity, which might immediately seem to constrict the rights people currently seem to have (like, oh, say, public annotation), it would actually contract the 'rights' of the owners significantly. Kiss the DMCA goodbye, for instance. (Making the act of breaking copyright protection for the legal purpose of creating a backup copy? Nonsense!)

Microsoft has been bringin' me down over IE5.5 for Windows Misc.6/5/2000; 7:13:47 AM April 10, 2000: Even as I've been going into spastic twitching fits over Mozilla (If you've ever seen Disney's Alladin, think Jafar's first few seconds of being a genie... "The power! The incredible power! The stars leap at my command!" or something to that effect), Microsoft has been bringin' me down over IE5.5 for Windows. The Web Standards Projects had some stuff to say about it, and I second it.

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Digital signatures a threat to privacy? Privacy from Companies6/5/2000; 7:13:45 AM April 10, 2000: Update: Wesley Felter points out the the article incorrectly states what a digital signiture is. *D'oh* should have noticed that myself. Still, I was too busy being in a holy rage about holding the consumers responsible for all screw-ups... yeah, that's it...

Digital signatures a threat to privacy?: "The problem for anonymous users is the amount of personal information that is encoded with the signature. For example, a site selling beer online may ask for proof of age. Current digital certificates would not provide that information but would identify the user by name or an ID ... [much later]Currently, two congressional bills will put consumers in the hot seat if their digital signature is used improperly. [National Consumer Law Center?s] Saunders said such laws can only hurt consumers and online businesses both."

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Opinion Reconsidered Personal Commentary6/5/2000; 7:13:38 AM April 7, 2000: I'm feeling bad today and I'll soon be going home (where my Internet access is really bad) for the weekend, so no more updates.

However, I reconsidered my opinion on the recent ruling as code-as-expression, and I'm not as optimistic as I was. I posted this in the Userland DG, but I'll reproduce it here:

My logical train of thought asks, "If code is protected speech, how can you patent it? Shouldn't it be more analogous to a trademark?"
No, trademarks are only identifying marks for companies and products; you can't protect code that way. You might put code in your trademark (like composing the letters "IBM" out of "Hello World" or something), but that still wouldn't prevent me using the code in a program, only in displaying the code in the form of that trademark.

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