The DMCA is being used to silence researchers, computer scientists and critics.
Corporations are using it against the public. Public/College radio stations can no longer afford to webcast.
DVD-Jon wins new legal victory
Norway's most famous computer whiz got an early Christmas present on Monday.
An appeals court in Oslo upheld Jon Lech Johansen's earlier acquittal on all
counts of alleged copyright violations. A verdict in the case, which has caught international attention, wasn't
expected until early January. But the appeals court (Borgarting
lagmannsrett) apparently didn't see any need to wait with its decision.
UN World Summit on Internet physical security breeched
A group of researchers has succeed in gaining unauthorized access
to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).
The official Summit badges, which are plastic and the size of a credit card, hide a .RF smart card. [1] - a hidden chip that can communicate its information via radio frequency. It carries both a unique identifier associated with the participant, and a radio frequency tag (RFID) that can be "read" when close to a sensor. These sensors can be located anywhere, from vending machines to the entrance of a specific meeting room allowing the remote identification and tracking of participants, or groups of participants, attending the event.
DVD-Jon trial - "Let the judges decide"
Defense counsel for 'DVD-Jon' Lech Johansen tried to cut to the heart of the matter of the appeals case against his client, who is being tried again for his role in creating a software solution to remove copy protection from DVD films. Johansen was cleared on all counts in the first trial earlier this year.
iTunes shoppers discover DRM
"I'm glad to see the system is being challenged, not being a user of ITunes I didn't realize there were copying limitations on the files. For the life of me I can't figure out why on earth ANYONE would be willing to spend $1.00 per song and get nothing more than a file. This seems to me that the consumer is being screwed royally by the RIAA.
Fatwallet files lawsuit against Best Buy, Attempts to protect poster identities.
Faced with demands by national retailers under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to remove Thanksgiving sales information from its web site for the second year in a row, FatWallet, Inc. filed a lawsuit yesterday in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois seeking a declaration that these demands constitute an abuse of the DMCA and violate the First Amendment rights of both FatWallet and its users (FatWallet, Inc. v. Best Buy Enterprise Services, Inc., et al., Case No. 03C50508).
Group warns of Europe's 'DMCA on steroids'
The groups argue that the proposed IP Enforcement Directive, is a "DMCA on steroids" that would hand broad anti-competitive powers to large foreign companies, limit competition, and erode the traditional rights of consumers to use the products they purchase as they see fit.
Share 'True Crime,' do the time
The MPAA is apparently, suing the pants off of teenagers RIAA-style
isn't good enough, they want to go ahead and throw you in jail. To that
end, their senators will introduce the Artists' Rights and Theft
Prevention Act today; which carries with it a maximum sentence of 3 years
in prison and a $250,000 fine. Here's the best part: you don't have to
infringe on copyright to be found guilty!
Touch-Screen Voting Snags Continue
New touchscreen voting machines caused problems last night in the suburbs of Washington D.C.. Several machines failed and had to be rebooted, and nine were actually removed from the site, repaired, and returned, in violation of election laws. The machines also failed to report their results correctly due to network problems.
NY Times: File Sharing Pits Copyright Against Free Speech
The New York Times has a very informative article on File Sharing,
Diebold, EVoting and how they are all interconnected. Quote:
We're so focused on the microview -- whether EMI is going to make a buck next year -- but there is so much more at stake in our battle to control the flows of information.
CA Win: Calif. Halts E-Vote Certification
SACRAMENTO, California -- Uncertified software may have been installed on electronic voting machines used in one California county, according to the secretary of state's office.
Marc Carrel, assistant secretary of state for policy and planning, told attendees Thursday at a panel on voting systems that California was halting the certification process for new voting machines manufactured by Diebold Election Systems.
Students receiving cease-desists from Diebold
Students from 20 universities are starting to
receive cease and desist letters from Diebold Election Systems. A copy of
the cease-and-desist letter received by MIT is here. The letters are in response to our coordinated electronic civil disobedience
effort to keep a compressed file of internal Diebold memos alive and force
them to do a legal version of "whack a mole."
Students Fight E-Vote Firm
Swathmore students are protesting efforts by Diebold to prevent them and other
website owners from linking to some 15,000 internal company memos that reveal
the company was aware of security flaws in its e-voting software for years
but sold the faulty systems to states anyway. The memos were leaked to voting activists and journalists by a hacker who broke into an insecure Diebold FTP
server in March.
More TechTV: Block the RIAA
PeerGuardian is a free program that hides your file sharing from known RIAA informants. Each time you launch PeerGuardian, it downloads the latest list of known RIAA informants and blocks them from connecting to your computer. The list contains hundreds of known IP-address ranges the RIAA has used to catch file swappers.
TechTV: Mod Your Xbox
TechTV article explains how to mod your xbox. Quote: Xbox mods aren't supported by Microsoft and may be illegal under the DMCA. Choose a mod chip. There are close to a dozen varieties of mod chips, all with different options and features. Rather than bore you with the details on each chip, let's cut to the chase. Here are the best mod chips on the market.
Time to Recall E-Vote Machines?
As Californians head to the polls on Tuesday, voters in at least one county will cast their ballots electronically on machines that have been shown to be flawed. Reverse engineering these voting machines is illegal under the DMCA unless
you are approved by Diebold.
Newest Audio CD DRM Proves Ineffective
I find that the protections may have no effect on a large fraction of deployed
PCs, and that most users who would be affected can bypass the system entirely
by holding the shift key every time they insert the CD.
DMCA subpoenas give copyright holders more power than U.S. law enforcement agencies
WASHINGTON - Three more U.S. senators have questioned a provision in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that allows copyright holders to subpoena the names of alleged file traders without first getting a judge's permission, with one suggesting that the DMCA subpoenas give copyright holders more power than U.S. law enforcement agencies have to seek information on terrorists.
EFF publishes report on trusted computing: "Promise and Risk"
Who Controls Your Computer?
Electronic Frontier Foundation Reports on Trusted Computing
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
yesterday published a landmark report on trusted computing,
a technology designed to improve security through hardware
changes to the personal computer.
Recording Artist Moby to Record Labels: Sue ME
RIAA
9/29/2003 - New York City
so apparently the riaa are sueing one of our very own moby.com board members, liquidlevel, for file-sharing.
personally i just can't see any good in coming from punishing people for being music fans and making the effort to hear new music.
i'm almost tempted to go onto kazaa and download some of my own music, just to see if the riaa would sue me for having mp3's of my own songs on my hard-drive.
-moby
