Legislation urged to protect corporate data Misc.6/21/2001; 8:52:39 AM A lot of littler interesting tidbits in this article. The one they picked as the lead story isn't even particularly interesting. I was most amused by this one:'In other testimony, trade group officials said legislation is needed to keep corporate security data that's shared with government agencies from becoming public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). '"Companies worry that if information sharing with the government really becomes a two-way street, FOIA requests for information they have provided to an agency could prove embarrassing or costly," said Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, an industry trade group in Arlington, Va.'That would be a novel, if slow, way of getting your competitor's secrets... charge them with something criminal, get the government to confiscate the secrets you are interested in, then file an FOIA request to obtain them. I suppose they're right to be concerned.Still, I don't see why this can't be written to apply to everybody, not just "corporations". A person shouldn't be subjected to that either.
Coming to small claims court: Roadrunner vs. Acme Rent-a-Car
Misc.
6/19/2001; 7:21:01 PM 'When Turner signed Acme's rental agreement last October, he didn't notice the warning at the top of the contract that read: "Vehicles in excess of posted speed limit will be charged $150 fee per occurrence. All our vehicles are GPS equipped."'
Another idle threat of the "technology paranoids" comes true. Automated speeding tickets courtesy of GPS. Granted, it's private sector right now, but who says that will stay true?
Smart Tags and the Microsoft Problem Revisited Free Speech6/17/2001; 11:12:24 PM 'Here’s the bad news for Microsoft: their SmartTags technology, applied to the web would likely be illegal in most countries outside of the United States.'Here’s the bad news for us: Microsoft’s SmartTags would likely be completely legal inside the United States, when applied to content that originates within the country’s borders.'Why? Something called moral rights. Most civilized countries recognize them; but the United States doesn’t.'One of the moral rights mentioned is the right to integrity. I think this right is the single most important right that we lack in this country. Without the right to integrity, our communication, both on and off the 'net, will increasingly be subjected to the whims of those with power. Microsoft's Smart Tags and other annotation technologies are frankly only the beginning of the inevitable deluge. We must fight for this right of integrity and not give it up because it appears convenient at the moment. Integrity must take precedence over whatever so-called "rights" get in its way, or none of our rights relating to communication (''free speech'') will have any meaning.What good is annotation if annotation authors have no integrity rights either? What good is any communication if there is no integrity? Even if there is a "right" to annotate or change content as Smart Tags do, it's insignificant next to the importance of integrity. Annotation is not worth the price.
Evergreen Albums
Music & MP3
6/16/2001; 3:53:14 PM 'This is a study of long-term album sales trends using data taken from the Recording Industry Association of America's web site. The data is downloadable as text files for further analysis- my primary interest in doing this study was to work out which albums and artists have been able to drive long-term sales even after record industry hype had moved on to other, newer records, and whether there were any surprises in the data. There were.'
I found this interesting. I'm not quite sure what to make of it, but it is interesting.
The Wrong Way to Do Dirty Tricks Humor/Amusing6/16/2001; 3:15:08 PM 'A startling report from the Minnesota Senate race provides a stunning example of American politics as tech-cluelessness combined with petty nastiness.'Christine Gunhus, the wife of a U.S. senator who ran unsuccessfully for re-election in 2000, pleaded no contest last week to charges of using a pseudonym to unlawfully send e-mail messages that disparaged her husband's Democratic rival.'That would be unusual enough in itself, but this look at how not to write e-mail nastygrams underscores the risks of using technology you don't understand -- especially when it can reveal your identity...'
Bar association may oppose UCITA
UCITA
6/14/2001; 6:38:26 PM 'The American Bar Association may vote at its annual meeting in August to oppose UCITA unless the controversial software licensing law is extensively revised.
'The ABA's Tort and Insurance Practice Section, a major group within the Washington-based organization, stated in a recent resolution obtained by Computerworld that UCITA should be "extensively revised" to more adequately reflect current law on licensing intellectual property, "with due regard for basic rights of consumers and the protection of licensees from unwarranted unilateral actions of the licensor." This language is included in a resolution that may be considered by the ABA's approximately 530-member House of Delegates, its national legislative body.'
U.S. judge to hear Yahoo! case of French Nazi ban Country Watch: France6/13/2001; 12:30:48 PM 'In a case with broad implications for free speech on the Internet, a U.S. federal judge has agreed to consider whether foreign courts may determine what Yahoo! Inc. sells on its auction site, a company spokesman said on Friday....'U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose on Thursday rejected a French request to throw out Yahoo!'s challenge to a French court order last year which sought to block Yahoo's auctions of Nazi items under broad French anti-hate speech laws.'Yahoo!'s objection is that France actually required Yahoo! to comply with French laws worldwide, thus they had to remove all Nazi materials from all Yahoo! sites, even those not in France. Contrast this with the previous news story...
Harm from the Hague Misc.6/12/2001; 8:20:50 PM 'The Hague treaty is not actually about patents, or about copyrights, or about censorship, but it affects all of them. It is a treaty about jurisdiction, and how one country should treat the court decisions of another country. The basic idea is reasonable enough: If someone hits your car in France or breaks a contract with your French company, you can sue him in France, then bring the judgment to a court in whichever country he lives in (or has assets in) for enforcement.'The intersection of all activities not banned by patent, copyright, and censorship restrictions somewhere in the world is effectively a null set. It is not reasonable to assume that this tidbit of knowlege, obvious even to a computer nerd, has somehow consistently escaped the treaty writers. Thus, one must search for the motivation behind this treaty, because on the face of it, the whole idea is incredibly stupid and naive.Only two motivations seem to be in the running: Money (corporate interests) and power. Money does not seem likely to me; any company interested in using this to their advantage is just as likely to find themselves on the wrong end of a lawsuit in Nigeria or Egypt or Hong Kong or who knows where (perhaps "The Country That Always Finds In Favor Of The Prosecution, For A Small Price", recently formed off the coast of, oh, let's say France?). Then again, corporate interests are notoriously short-sighted... perhaps this is yet another example of a purchased law that will inevitable come back to haunt the purchasers.Still, I feel the only viable conclusion is that this treaty must be a power play by somebody, as it is equally obvious even to a computer nerd that all the courts in the world working 24 hours a day could not possibly service all the possible suits that could be filed should this go through. 100% enforcement is clearly not the intention. The whole point is going to be selective enforcement, which directly translates to power in the hands of whoever is doing the enforcing. (That's a powerful argument against proliferating laws, BTW; the power of selective enforcement tends to fly under the radar and remains undetected until it's in strafing range, but it's a very real power nonetheless.)Still, I can't think of a party that doesn't stand to lose as much as they might gain. Perhaps somebody can answer this for me: Who truly gains from this? The only answer I can think of is "the Third World" (giving them extensive powers over the courts of the rest of the world, notably the First World), but that's a vague answer and still doesn't explain why anybody else would sign this thing... who gains?(A truly paranoid answer: Only those countries with the maximal restrictions on speech, patents, or copyrights. For instance, Afghanistan. Afghanistan would be able to propogate its control far and wide. So, the people pushing for support of this treaty are those who want this control propogated, and are using this as a door to turn otherwise free countries into effective dictatorships in certain areas. It's paranoid, of course... but the thought has certainly crossed more then one mind.)
Microsoft Tries To Get Smart Humor/Amusing6/11/2001; 7:40:10 PM 'Microsoft bashers were out in full-force last week, chastising the company for a new technology in the forthcoming version of its Windows operating system they say infringes on free speech, intellectual property and the copyrights of Web content creators.'What's it all about? Microsoft is considering adding a feature to Windows XP (link to Microsoft XP order info page), due out Oct. 25, that would take users to links predetermined by Microsoft (link to favorable article about Microsoft).'Few situations call for the injection of humor more then a ferocious debate about a proposed feature for an unreleased operating system that may or may not affect rights that we may or may not have.
Law Review Article Says Port Scanning Illegal Misc.6/11/2001; 9:13:23 AM From Slashdot:
Anonymous Coward writes: "The Journal of Technology Law and Policy has a good article on computer security and privacy.... It's interesting to see the computer security from a lawyer's point of view. Especially interesting are his claims that using nmap is illegal, despite the VC3 v. Moulton case...." Actually, I think the metaphors throughout this piece (not just at the beginning) are what make it interesting, and a big component of law is dealing with metaphors.You probably know how I feel about those treacherous metaphors: Useful for exaplaining, useless for determining. You might also want to look at my explanation of port scanning, if you've never heard of it before. I couldn't find a satisfactory explanation on the net so I wrote my own.