Conversion to News Item Administrative 5/2/2000; 1:23:52 AM This site is converting to the News Item format, because the ability to view by department is a killer feature for a weblog like this. There will be a surge of news, as I'm going to pull the old stories into this format. Having fun!

Put all of what the British government is doing together, in conjunction with the Godfrey libel ruling from the courts, and I wouldn't dare be online in Britain anymore! I would actually be personally scared.

What can I say? "The new spy centre will decode messages that have been encrypted. Under new powers due to come into force this summer, police will be able to require individuals and companies to hand over computer 'keys', special codes that unlock scrambled messages."

MI5 builds new centre to read e-mails on the net: "MI5 is building a new £25m e-mail surveillance centre that will have the power to monitor all e-mails and internet messages sent and received in Britain. The government is to require internet service providers, such as Freeserve and AOL, to have 'hardwire' links to the new computer facility so that messages can be traced across the internet." Emphasis mine.

And now we catch up with today and the weekend:

As with any other IP issue, this is not just about the topic du jour (music), it's about everything, all at once.

Indeed, taken away from the context of MP3 and looked at in terms of content distribution, this was a good, even great ruling. People should not be archiving content in a degraded format and handing it out, no matter what hoops people would have to jump through to get it. I don't want to have to allow that with my writings, for instance. (The word "degraded" is importent... if it's perfect, then it's more like a cache, which is another issue entirely.

Of course this sent the MP3 fan(atics) into a rabid tailspin, in particular Our Hero Jon Katz, who makes big and unnecessary noises about how the genie isn't going back in the bottle.

The C|Net article has more details about the nature of the service.

Good news! US Court Rules MP3 Violated Copyright Law: "A U.S. federal court ruled on Friday that MP3.com Inc. violated copyright law with the creation of its database in which users can store music and then access it via any computer connected to the Internet." I would have been surprised with any other ruling. One of the copyrights is the right of distribution, and MP3 was indeed distributed music in an active sense.